Turner Classic Movies

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For one teen, life became a musical whirlwind

For a moment in the 1950s, real life was like someone’s daydream.
A small-town teenager visited Broadway. A few hours later, she was at the core of the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein empire.
This comes to mind now, as Turner Classic Movies has a spurt of classic musicals. The films (also on HBO Max) include:
— Shirley Jones films Monday (Aug. 25). “Oklahoma” (shown here, 1955) and “Carousel” (1956), both with Gordon MacRae, are at 5:30 and 8 p.m. ET; “The Music Man” (1962), with Robert Preston, is at 10:15 p.m.
— Donald O’Connor films Thursday. That peaks at 8 p.m. ET with “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), with Gene Kelly — who choreographed dazzling dance numbers and then performed then with O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / August 23, 2025
Stories

August lull? TCM offers star marathons

Just as TV hits its low point, Turner Classic Movies fills the void.
It does that each August, with “Summer Under the Stars.” Each day brings a marathon of films from one star.
Some of those people have been featured often. On Saturday and Sunday (Aug. 9-10), Elizabeth Taylor (shown here with Paul Newman) and Clark Gable will be back-to-back.
But others get their first time in the August spotlight. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / August 3, 2025
Stories

Coppola: mini-budgets, maxi-budgets, triumphs

As cable prepares its Coppolathon, it’s time to reflect on a dazzling career,
On Thursday (July 31), Turner Classic Movies will show Francis Ford Coppola, 86, receiving the American Film Institute’s lifetime achievement award. That’s at 8 p.m. and midnight ET, alongside two Coppola films — one epic (“Apocalypse Now,” shown here) and one not (“The Rain People”).
This is a career that has weaved through the extremes — some soft porn, a couple cheapies, a tad of comedy, two musicals and some great dramas. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / July 30, 2025
Stories

It will be Oscar night every night

Think of this as Super Bowl season for movie buffs.
It’s when Turner Classic Movies dips into its bottomless library for “31 Days of Oscar.” That starts Feb. 1 and continues through Academy Award night (March 2), with films ranging from 1928 to 2017.
This is the 30th year for the marathon, with the set-up changing – some years are alphabetical or chronological or whatever.
This year, daytime (anything before 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT) will bunch the films by nominee categories. During the weekend that daytime category is always best-picture. Viewers can catch such gems as “In the Heat of the Night” (shown here) at 6 p.m. ET Feb. 1 and “Tom Jones” at 3 p.m. Feb. 2. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / January 27, 2025
Stories

August is TV’s Julie-and-Blake month

It seemed like one of those weird Hollywood mismatches.
Blake Edwards was a writer-director, fresh from movies with big, goofy sight gags. Julie Andrews was a singer-actress, fresh from mega-musicals.
He was Hollywood; she was London and Broadway. They were miles apart … and then, after their marriage in 1969, constantly together, sometimes making fluff and other times creating serious comedy/dramas like “Victor/Victoria” (shown here), which is the centerpiece of an Aug. 4 cable marathon..
“Seeing the shift in her career, when Blake … urged her to take on very different roles, I found was fascinating,” said producer Michael Kantor. And now, by coincidence, each gets a separate focus in August: Read more…

By Mike Hughes / July 26, 2024
Stories

These movie masters started with micro-budgets

Where do the great filmmakers come from?
Baseball has its minor leagues, NASCAR has county fairgrounds, music has juke joints and dive bars. And for a time, filmmakers had Roger Corman.
Now that will be noted in a cable marathon. In eight hours (starting at 8 p.m. ET, July 17), Turner Classic Movies has the first films of Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme and Peter Bogdanovich (whose “Targets,” with Boris Karloff, is shown here). Read more…

By Mike Hughes / July 9, 2024
Stories

He was a micro-budget movie master

Hollywood has people who think big, talk big, spend big. Budgets soar.
But then there was Roger Corman, who died last month at 98. He made kinda-good movies on really awful budgets. Now they’re featured in three Wednesday marathons on Turner Classic Movies.
Wedged into 28 hours on July 3, 10 and 17 will be 18 movies – some of them scary (including “Masque of the Red Death,” shown here) some of them frantic, none of them expensive. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / July 1, 2024
Stories

Here’s the good, the bad and the schlocky

Yes, movies keep trying to be bigger and better.
But it’s time to celebrate the opposite – ones that are brash and bizarre and, at times, really bad.
On Friday night (June 16), Turner Classic Movies has a sort of schlockfest, from “Beach Blanket Bingo” (shown here) and “Barbarella” (8 and 9:45 p.m. ET) to the notorious “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” at 5:45 a.m.
All of them fit the loose category of “camp.” In a short film on its website, TCM describes camp as when “artifice and exaggeration transcends taste” and when it has “style over substance,” a place where “pretentiousness and virtue are left behind.” Read more…

By Mike Hughes / June 8, 2023
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Marathon will offer decades of Lansbury

Long before Angela Lansbury solved murders on TV, she had a vibrant movie career.
That started 40 years before “Murder, She Wrote,” when the teen-aged Lansbury drew an Academy Award nomination for “Gasligh.” (show here, behind Oscar-winner Ingrid Bergman. She would get another nomination the next year (for “The Picture of Dorian Gray”) and another 17 years later, for her chilling maternity in “The Manchurian Candidate.”
Now all three films are part of a 24-hour tribute to Lansbury that Turner Classic Movies has set for Nov. 21. She died Tuesday, five days shy of her 97th birthday; see separate commetary here. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / October 15, 2022
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Stockwell’s child-star years get TCM focus

To many TV viewers, Dean Stockwell was the actor who filled catchy supporting roles in “Quantum Leap” and beyond.
But Stockwell was also a child star. On Nov. 22, a Turner Classic Movies marathon will have seven films he made before he was a teen-ager, including “Kim” (show here with Errol Flynn) and “The Secret Garden”; most of them were dead-serious, many had crying scenes.
Stockwell died Sunday (Nov. 7) at 85, six years after he had a stroke and retired from acting. By then, people knew him as a supporting actor on “Quantum Leap” (getting four Emmy nominations), “JAG” and “Battlestar Galactica.” Read more…

By Mike Hughes / November 11, 2021