Here Are Paul Thomas Anderson's Personal Recommendations For Classic Movies As TCM's New Advisor

It's been a long road, getting from there to here. 

One might recall in June of 2023, it was announced that several key executives and programmers at Turner Classic Movies were callously canned by the new management at their parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. For many, this was tantamount to nixing TCM altogether. CEO David Zaslav made this decision at the end of a string of bad decisions that made him look like the film world's most callous villain. After the weird rebranding of HBO Max to merely Max, it was starting to look like Zaslav didn't give a damn about film history. 

It certainly looked that way to Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson, three lovers of vintage film and advocates for the preservation of classics. The trio famously called Zaslav to appeal for the retaining of TCM and the re-hiring of some of their old staff. A recording of that conversation is not available to the public (quite sadly), but after it took place, Zaslav made a few new decisions, presumably on the filmmakers' behalf. He rehired Charles Tabesh, TCM's former VP of programming and content strategy, and invited Scorsese, Spielberg, and Anderson to curate selections on TCM every month from September until June 2024. It's a pity Zaslav had to be pressured at all — one would hope the CEO of a century-old entertainment company would have a shred of respect for the medium of film — but it seems that he let TCM survive for the time being. 

As of this writing, all three filmmakers have made their selections, announced on TCM's Twitter account. Spielberg's choices were, perhaps predictably, boldly mainstream and widely accessible. Scorsese's picks were less well-known, intense, and grittier. 

Anderson's picks are more crime-directed, featuring noir films and blackmail dramas that expose the vulnerabilities of humankind.

John Farrow directed the first cut of the Robert Mitchum 1951 noir thriller "His Kind of Woman," but evidently producer Howard Hughes was very unhappy with it, and hired an uncredited Richard Fleischer to reshoot large portions of it. The result is a film that critic Kim Morgan referred to as a "stoner noir." Morgan estimates the film to be casual and sleepy in the way stoner comedies would be in 20 more years' time, pointing out that 30 minutes of film elapses before the protagonist even figures out what's happening. This seems like an apt recommendation from the director of a deliberately unfocused film like "Inherent Vice." 

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's "Night Ambush" aka "Ill Met By Night," follows the real-life adventures of a battalion of British troops (Led by Dirk Bogarde) who travel to Crete to kidnap a vicious Nazi general (Marius Goring) hiding there. Anderson also recommended Barry Levinson's hangout movie "Diner" from 1982, a movie about men (all future stars) bonding over their mutual frustrations in 1959 Baltimore.

Perhaps well known to TCM viewers is Alexander Mackendrick's vicious showbiz journalism drama "Sweet Smell of Success." This is a film about men who are, in turn, powerful and pathetic. It's razor-sharp, dark, and brilliant. Definitely worth a look is Basil Dearden's 1961 queer drama "Victim," about a gay closeted lawyer (Bogarde) who is targeted by a blackmailer. It's one of the earliest studio films to so openly discuss homosexuality. 

Anderson's picks will air as follows:

• "His Kind of Woman" (1951) – September 9 at 2:00 p.m. ET
• "Night Ambush" (1957) – September 13 at 3:30 a.m. ET
• "Diner" (1982) – September 15 at Midnight ET
• "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957) – September 19 at 4 a.m. ET
• "Victim" (1961) – September 27 at Midnight ET