TCM Monthly Preview: April 2025

April is a big month on TCM and I mean that structurally, not just in terms of quality. There are recurring threads running through the whole month that, if you follow them, give the schedule a real sense of architecture. Every Wednesday night is devoted to Acts of Faith - a series called “The Religious Life” that moves through Judaism, Christianity, and world religions across the month’s Wednesdays, building toward what looks like a genuinely contemplative finale on the 30th. Every Monday belongs to Red Skelton, the Star of the Month. And every Friday has a “Pulp Fiction” spotlight working through different genre categories - Adventures, Film Noir, Villains & Detectives, Sci-Fi/Fantasy. TCM has been doing this kind of thing for a long time and I never stop appreciating it. It turns the month into a course instead of just a lineup.

Let's go day by day.

Tuesday, April 1st kicks things off with April Fools programming, which is about as on-the-nose as it gets but I’m not complaining. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) is the headliner at 8pm and it’s one of those movies I appreciate more than I love - it’s enormous and exhausting in ways that feel intentional, but the sheer size of the cast is worth something. The Producers follows at 11pm, which is a much better film and a much weirder one, and then the overnights give you Monkey Business, Bringing Up Baby, and Sherlock Jr., which is essentially a greatest-hits of comedy. If you’re only catching one, Bringing Up Baby is still one of the most perfectly constructed screwball comedies ever made.

Wednesday, April 2nd opens the Acts of Faith series with “The Religious Life.” Going My Way (1944) at 8pm, Black Narcissus (1947) at 10:15. I’ll take Black Narcissus every time - Powell and Pressburger doing a psychological breakdown inside a Himalayan convent is so much stranger and more unsettling than its premise suggests. The Deborah Kerr scenes near the end are genuinely disturbing. If you haven’t seen it, this is an easy yes.

Thursday, April 3rd is a guest programmer night with Tony Gilroy, and Klute (1971) at 8pm is a fantastic choice from him. Pakula’s paranoid New York, Jane Fonda at her absolute best, Donald Sutherland doing very little and somehow doing everything. It fits the Gilroy sensibility perfectly - systems that surveil and control, and people trying to find honesty inside them. This Land is Mine (1943) and Dead End (1937) follow overnight and are worth noting for completists, but Klute is the reason to show up.

Friday, April 4th runs “Pulp Fiction Adventures” starting with Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and Lost Horizon (1937). I have a genuine soft spot for Lost Horizon - Frank Capra making an adventure film about utopia, based on James Hilton’s novel, with Ronald Colman in the lead. It’s bigger and stranger than most people remember it being. The overnights include Gunga Din (1939), which is a great double-feature partner in spirit if you wanted to do a full colonial-era adventure block.

Saturday, April 5th has the Peter Weir double feature in prime time: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave (1977). This is a genuinely excellent pairing and one of the smarter programming choices of the early month. Both films are obsessed with mystery that refuses resolution, with the landscape itself as a kind of antagonist. They work better together than apart. Noir Alley gives us The Narrow Margin (1952) at midnight, which is a tight, efficient B-picture that I enjoyed more than I expected to.

Sunday, April 6th is the Carl Reiner spotlight we already talked about here, and I’m still glad it’s on the schedule. The Comic at 8, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid at 10, The New Klondike (1926) at midnight. I’ll say this time and time again on this blog: don’t skip the silent film if you can help it. The TCM Imports afterward give you Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) at 2am, which is extraordinary and genuinely feels like a gift at that hour for all you night owls.

Monday, April 7th starts the Red Skelton programming. The Whistling films run in a row - Whistling in the Dark (1941), Whistling in Dixie (1942), Whistling in Brooklyn (1943) - followed by Maisie Gets Her Man (1942). Maisie is the one I’d actually recommend here if you want something that crackles a little more. Ann Sothern’s energy is a different register than Skelton’s, and it shows.

Tuesday, April 8th is the night I’ve been circling since I first looked at the April schedule.

The “Dark City Dames” block runs The Killing (1956), Tension (1949), and Johnny O’Clock (1947) starting at 8pm, and this is just about as good a three-film noir night as TCM can put together on a Tuesday. The Killing is Kubrick at his most precise and, honestly, at his most purely entertaining - before he became Kubrick with a capital K, he was a director who could arrange a heist across a fractured timeline like assembling a piece of clockwork, and watching the whole thing snap into place is still genuinely thrilling. The tragedy of it comes from how perfectly he engineers the inevitability of failure. Nothing in the film could have gone differently and that’s the point.

Tension is quieter and meaner. It’s built around obsession rather than spectacle - a man who plans a murder carefully and then loses his nerve at the worst possible moment. Richard Basehart is really good in it. It doesn’t get talked about the way the Friday night heavyweights usually do, but as a portrait of a man unraveling from the inside, it earns its place on any noir night.

Johnny O’Clock is mid-tier by design and I mean that warmly. Dick Powell, racketeering, atmosphere. Not every noir needs to be a masterpiece. Sometimes the genre just feels like a warm bath, and this is one of those.

Wednesday, April 9th is the night I’m perhaps most curious about from an emotional standpoint.

The “Pictures of Judaism” theme presents Yentl (1983) at 8pm, Fiddler on the Roof (1971) at 10:30, The Chosen (1981) at 1:45am, and The Dybbuk (1937) at 3:45am. I wrote about the Fiddler and Yentl pairing in the weekly post (edit: I’ve moved away from weekly posts, and deleted this one), but the full four-film stretch here is remarkable. TCM has reversed the order from what I might have predicted - Yentl first, then Fiddler - and I think that might actually work better. Yentl is so interior, so much about the private negotiations of faith and identity, and then Fiddler lands harder. The movement from small to large makes both films hit harder.

And then you stay up for The Dybbuk (1937). Please stay up for The Dybbuk. It’s a Polish Yiddish-language film based on S. An-sky’s play, and it exists almost entirely outside the Hollywood framework - there’s something ritual and incantatory about it that I don’t know how to place inside a normal genre vocabulary. It’s one of those films where you finish it and feel like you’ve been transported somewhere. The people who made it were killed in the Holocaust within a few years of its release, and that knowledge doesn’t leave you as you watch it. This is essential viewing.

Thursday, April 10th features Marjorie Main and opens with Ma and Pa Kettle (1949) and The Women (1939). I wrote about both in the weekly post and my position is the same: The Women is one of the most endlessly watchable films in the classical era, and the Kettle film is a different kind of pleasure. Stay up for Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) at 3:15am if you can - Vincente Minnelli’s Technicolor MGM is one of his very best.

Friday, April 11th is the canonical Film Noir marathon and I’ve already laid it out: The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944), My Gun is Quick (1957), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and Harper (1966). This is a compressed genre history running from the classical template through to neo-noir’s self-awareness. You could watch the whole thing as an education or pick two and call it a night. I’d pick Falcon and Postman if you want thematic contrast: certainty versus fatalism, Bogart’s cool self-possession against Turner and Garfield burning themselves alive.

Saturday, April 12th has the Erskine Caldwell double feature in prime time - God’s Little Acre (1958) and Claudelle Inglish (1961) - and Noir Alley gives us The Steel Trap (1952). The Caldwell films are steamy Southern Gothic that TCM programs every few years, and there’s something enjoyably lurid about both of them. But The Steel Trap is the real draw for noir heads - Joseph Cotten, a tightly wound 85 minutes, and the particular brand of domestic anxiety that makes noir feel so much more intimate than people expect.

Sunday, April 13th gives Rod Steiger a prime-time tribute for his upcoming 100th birthday, and the pairing is about as good as it gets: On the Waterfront (1954) at 8pm and In the Heat of the Night (1967) at 10pm. Both films are about moral confrontation in specific American contexts - the docks, the Deep South - and Steiger’s performance in each is completely different in texture. His Friendly in Waterfront is operatic, all gestures and threats. His Gillespie in Heat of the Night won him the Oscar and it deserved it. The quiet evolution of that character over the course of one humid night is as good as character work gets in Hollywood films. This is a must-watch Sunday.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) runs at midnight as the Silent Sunday entry, and the TCM Imports are Ozu’s Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951) - back to back Ozu in the early morning is a particular kind of meditative pleasure if you’re wired that way.

Monday, April 14th continues Red Skelton’s month with Ship Ahoy and I Dood It in prime time, and Du Barry Was a Lady (1943) at midnight. These are big MGM Technicolor productions and they have their appeal, but this is the Monday I’d probably use for sleep.

Tuesday, April 15th brings Marty Stuart curating Music in the Movies with Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) leading the night - a genuinely great film, Sissy Spacek’s performance is one of the best in that entire era, and the musical recreation feels earned rather than commemorative. The Road to Nashville (1967) follows as a more obscure companion piece.

Wednesday, April 16th is the Acts of Faith “Stories of Christ” night, running from The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) at 8pm through to The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) in the early morning. That Pasolini film at 4:30am is the one I’d set an alarm for. It’s a documentary-style, non-Hollywood reading of Matthew’s gospel with a non-professional cast, and it has the quality of something found rather than made. It belongs in a completely different category than the blockbuster films earlier in the evening.

Thursday, April 17th begins the Merchant Ivory series with Merchant Ivory (2023), the documentary, followed by A Room with a View (1985). This is a warm, lush night - Helena Bonham Carter in Tuscany, everything lit like a painting you'd find in the Uffizi. Roseland (1977) runs at 12:15am and is the underrated entry here, a triptych of stories set in the famous dance hall that feels more melancholy and more alive than either of the bigger films around it.

Friday, April 18th runs “Villains and Detectives” for the Pulp Fiction spotlight. Arsène Lupin (1932) at 8pm is a fun Barrymore vehicle, but the surprise here is The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) at 2am - Fritz Lang’s sequel to his own Dr. Mabuse films, made in Germany just as the Nazis were consolidating power and subsequently banned by Goebbels. Lang claimed he made it as an anti-fascist allegory. Whether that’s entirely true is an interesting debate we can have in the comments below, but the film itself is remarkable regardless.

Saturday, April 19th runs “A Night in Sherwood Forest” with The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Robin and Marian (1976) - which is one of TCM’s better thematic pairings of the month. The 1938 film is pure Hollywood Technicolor spectacle; the 1976 Lester film is about aging, loss, and what happens to heroes after the story ends. Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn. The contrast between the two films does more work than either does alone. Noir Alley gives us The Set-Up (1949), which is Robert Wise directing a boxing film in real time - 72 minutes, practically no plot compression. It’s as close to theater as Hollywood B-pictures ever got.

Sunday, April 20th is Easter, and TCM marks it with Ben-Hur (1959) at 6am and The Silver Chalice (1954) and Barabbas (1961) throughout the day. The prime-time slot gives you Easter Parade (1948) and Harvey (1950), which is the better film. Jimmy Stewart talking to an invisible six-foot rabbit is somehow both the gentlest and the most philosophically interesting movie on the Easter lineup.

Monday, April 21st is another Red Skelton Monday - Bathing Beauty (1944), Neptune’s Daughter (1949), and Texas Carnival (1951). Esther Williams is technically in these as much as Skelton is, and if you’re a fan of her water spectaculars, this is the night for you.

Tuesday, April 22nd brings Marty Stuart back for Part 2 with Cabin in the Sky (1943) at 8pm. Vincente Minnelli directing an all-Black cast that includes Ethel Waters, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington’s orchestra, and Louis Armstrong. It has a complicated history as a product of Hollywood segregation-era “race films,” but as a piece of filmmaking and a document of extraordinary talent, it’s genuinely special.

Wednesday, April 23rd runs “World Religions” for Acts of Faith. The Message (1976) at 8pm is the big one - Anthony Quinn, about the founding of Islam, shot in two versions (Arabic and English). The Burmese Harp (1956) at 11:15pm is the hidden treasure of the evening: Kon Ichikawa’s story of a Japanese soldier in Burma who becomes a Buddhist monk rather than return to Japan after the war. It’s quiet and devastating and exactly the kind of film this theme should be surfacing.

Thursday, April 24th completes the Merchant Ivory pair with The Remains of the Day (1993) and Howard’s End (1992) - both essential Ivory, both with Anthony Hopkins, both doing something precise and careful with the English class system. The Remains of the Day is the more emotionally brutal of the two. Hopkins’ Stevens is one of cinema’s great studies in repression.

Friday, April 25th goes Sci-Fi and Fantasy for Pulp Fiction night - The Thing from Another World (1951) kicking things off, then The Land That Time Forgot (1974), Doc Savage (1975), and Red Sonja (1985). The Thing is still the reason to show up. Howard Hawks produced it, and the Cold War paranoia underneath the surface is as legible as the surface-level monster movie. Everything else is more of a midnight movie pleasure.

Saturday, April 26th runs “Harper Investigates” with Harper (1966) and The Drowning Pool (1975) in prime time - Paul Newman playing Lew Harper twice, a decade apart, and the difference in his energy is interesting. The earlier film is the better one, and it’s one of the cleaner neo-noir pictures of its era. Noir Alley gives us The Prowler (1951), which is arguably the most morally uncomfortable film in the Noir Alley rotation - a corrupt cop, a lonely housewife, and a plan that goes exactly as wrong as it should. Joseph Losey directing, Van Heflin absolutely terrifying as a man who has convinced himself he deserves everything.

Sunday, April 27th has a wonderful quirky theme: “Film Geeks.” Film Geek (2023), then Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and the 1923 short Dogs of War! It's a block of movies about movies and movie watching, which on some level is what this blog is about too. Silent Sunday brings The Temptress (1926) with Greta Garbo, and the TCM Imports close out the night with Children of Paradise (1945) at 2am - one of the great films in any language, made under Nazi occupation in France, an epic of theater and love and obsession. If you’ve never seen it, this is the night.

Monday, April 28th runs Red Skelton’s fourth and final Monday of the month through a string of early 50s MGM comedies. The Fuller Brush Man (1948) is probably the funniest of the batch.

Tuesday, April 29th turns to “Championship Teams” with Hoosiers (1986) and Bang the Drum Slowly (1973). Hoosiers is the obvious pick, but Bang the Drum Slowly is perhaps the better movie - Robert De Niro as a dying catcher, Michael Moriarty as his teammate who won't abandon him. It’s less a sports film than a film about watching someone die and not knowing what to do with that.

Wednesday, April 30th closes out Acts of Faith with “A Higher Calling.” The Song of Bernadette (1943) at 8pm, A Man for All Seasons (1966) at 10:45, and then two films I’d stay up for: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) at 3am and The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) at 4:30. The Dreyer is one of the greatest films ever made. Maria Falconetti’s face, filmed in close-up for 82 minutes, is just about the most extreme psychological document cinema has ever produced. And Rossellini’s Francis is something else entirely - he cast actual Franciscan monks, shot with natural light, and made something that feels less like hagiography and more like a documentary of grace. That these two films are on at 3 and 4:30 in the morning, back to back, feels like something TCM buried as a gift for whoever is still watching.

April 2025: The Superlatives

The One You Can’t Miss: The Killing (April 8, 8pm). Kubrick engineering failure like clockwork. Still the best film of the month.

The One to Stay Up For: The Dybbuk (April 9, 3:45am). Haunting, strange, irreplaceable, and part of a tradition that was almost entirely destroyed. This is the one.

The Hidden Treasure: The Prowler (Noir Alley, April 26, 12:15am). It doesn’t get talked about enough and Van Heflin should terrify you.

The Double Feature That Works Best: Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Robin and Marian (1976) on April 19. Myth made, and then myth mourned.

The Pairing That Deepens Both Films: Yentl and Fiddler on the Roof on April 9. Interior to exterior, private to communal. They earn each other.

The Performance Worth Your Time: Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night (April 13, 10pm). The Oscars were right.

The Underrated Entry of the Month: Bang the Drum Slowly (April 29, 10:15pm). People will skip it for Hoosiers and they shouldn’t.

The Gift at the End of the Month: The Passion of Joan of Arc and The Flowers of St. Francis back to back on the overnight of April 30. One of the most serious double features TCM will program all year and it airs at 3am on a Wednesday in April. That’s very TCM of them.

The Thread Worth Following All Month: The Acts of Faith Wednesdays, cumulative. None of them is perfect, but watching the series build - from domestic ritual to national myth to martyrdom - gives April a spine that most months don’t have.

The One That Will Surprise You: The Burmese Harp (April 23, 11:15pm). A Japanese film about a soldier who becomes a monk after a war that destroyed everything. It is not what the evening around it would lead you to expect, and that’s exactly why you should watch it.

Overall, April is a month that rewards patience. The canonical nights are there - the noir Tuesday, the Film Noir Friday, the Steiger Sunday - but the really interesting programming is in the threads and the late hours. Keep the schedule close this month. The best stuff is often the thing you weren’t planning to watch.