I have made many attempts to lessen the existential disaster we call Tuesday – tacos, trivia – but lately only one thing works. Every night just before 8pm, I hide my phone under a pillow in the next room, plate up a carb-heavy dinner, and turn on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) for Sweater Weather, a series of films dedicated to the transitional season. Every Tuesday in October, Alicia Malone, an affable Australian film historian wearing business casual and a flippy bob, introduces a double feature.
These are often midcentury melodramas featuring striking leads, serpentine plots, and the burnt hues of fall rendered in indulgent Technicolor. Like All That Heaven Allows (1955), about a widow who finds herself crushed under the weight of 1950s suburban conformity – and the teeny waistline of her swing skirts – while nursing a crush on her much-younger gardener. Or Leave Her to Heaven (1945), about a beautiful socialite so obsessed with her hapless husband that she will kill anyone who threatens their bond.
In these films, everyone has their original teeth and no one takes Ozempic. It’s my weekly break from doomscrolling, from whatever-maxxing, from the maddening norm of vertical content. I want to live in the world of Sweater Weather cinema all year long.
TCM has aired old movies since 1994, when the cable channel was launched by CNN’s founder, Ted Turner. The businessman was obsessed with movies – his favorite, Gone with the Wind, christened the network’s first broadcast – and had acquired MGM studio’s big film catalog from which to pull titles. At the time, deeper-cut movies rarely played on major networks, and real buffs had to trawl library archives to find what they were looking for.
From the start, TCM projected a reverence for the medium, airing uncut films in a wide range of genres – a 1930s screwball comedy in one slot, an 80s slasher flick in the next. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy are never interrupted by commercials for car insurance or pharmaceuticals. The network’s present-day hosts – led by Ben Mankiewicz, grandson of Citizen Kane scribe Herman J Mankiewicz – and guest stars serve up insider stories as they present each film.
Tom Hanks once spoke on TCM of having to tell Bette Davis, then an intimidating grande dame of the screen, that she had stolen his wife’s seat at an Academy Awards afterparty. When Amy Madigan won an Oscar earlier this year for best supporting actress in Weapons, TCM brought her on to talk about past roles, including one alongside the late Gene Hackman. Even Donald Trump appeared on TCM, in 2007, where in typical fashion he compared himself to Charles Foster Kane, the wealthy yet pitiable tycoon from Mankiewicz and Orson Welles’s masterpiece, Citizen Kane.
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