In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese in March 2015.

LONDON CALLING (March 11, 6am) --There are certain cities that are directly tied to the cinema, cities that have excited the imaginations of filmmakers throughout the history of the art form. The actual cities and their recreations in the studio have, for me at least, become interchangeable: The Clock by Vincente Minnelli, shot on the MGM backlot, is just as much of a New York picture as John Cassavetes' Shadows, shot on the streets with a 16mm camera. New York is one of those cities, of course: it's an amazing experience to watch the early paper prints of Manhattan street scenes, the Harold Lloyd picture Speedy, a Busby Berkeley movie like 42nd Street (which is set almost entirely indoors but catches the essence of the city), Force of Evil, Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, On the Bowery by Lionel Rogosin, the Cassavetes movie, Manhattan by Woody Allen, Prince of the City by Sidney Lumet, and so on--and then to see the continuation from early photos of New York or Walt Whitman's poetry. Paris is also one of those cities-- the Paris of the Lumières and Renoir and Bresson and Godard and Truffaut and Rohmer, and the younger filmmakers like Assayas and Desplechin, preceded by Flaubert and Balzac, by Eugène Atget, by Seurat and Degas. And there's Rome, and Tokyo, leveled and then re-built twice in the 20th century. And San Francisco, a city that is almost haunted. And, of course, Los Angeles. And London. London is old and vast and wondrous: every corner seems to take you down a different historical byway, and every stone seems layered with era after era. On March 11, TCM has a wonderful evening of films set in London, including Douglas Sirk's 1947 noir Lured, with Lucille Ball and George Sanders (the film is a remake of a 1939 French film by Robert Siodmak, Pièges), Thorold Dickinson's version of Gaslight with Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynard (the more famous American remake by George Cukor is just as good, with a different tone and emphasis), Fritz Lang's version of Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear, with Ray Milland (it's quite different from Greene's original, but a very good movie all the same), and Alfred Hitchcock's first picture in England since the early sound era, Stage Fright. Four different directors, four different ideas of a grand city that is just as much a star as the names above the titles.

ALAN ARKIN (March 24, 8pm) --On March 24, TCM is honoring one of the best actors in the history of movies, Alan Arkin. Arkin is so good, his sense of comedy so refined, that he has always been slightly underrated (that's been the case with many great comic actors). There will be a broadcast of a conversation with Arkin filmed at last year's TCM Classic Film Festival, which I know will be memorable: he's extremely eloquent about his craft. Four of his pictures will be shown, two of his best dramatic performances (in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Wait Until Dark) and two of his supreme comic performances. We've covered Hearts of the West in a past column--it's a lovely picture about low budget moviemaking in Hollywood in the '30s, and it deserves to be better known. The In-Laws has, of course, become a classic, and you can never see it too many times. If you want to know what comic genius is, watch Arkin and Peter Falk at work in this movie.