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.

TCM SPOTLIGHT: FIVE CAME BACK (Tuesdays, 8pm)--This month, TCM is doing a salute to Mark Harris' remarkable book Five Came Back, combining the wartime experiences of Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler into one grand narrative about the meeting ground between art and experience. These five were among the most lauded and respected directors in Hollywood by the time they went to war (Ford, Huston, Stevens and Wyler literally went to war--Capra was the only one to remain "stateside," as people used to say). Each one of them was permanently altered by what they went through and their approach to cinema was altered as well. The next time you watch It's a Wonderful Life, Shane, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, They Were Expendable or The Best Years of Our Lives (you'll have a chance to revisit the last three with this tribute, running throughout the month), remember that they would have been either unmade or extremely different if their directors had never seen what they'd seen. It seems obvious in the case of the Wyler and Ford films, but in each case you find a greater gravity and seriousness of purpose after 1945. The programming of this tribute is remarkable and it deserves special mention. Every director gets his own Tuesday night slot, and the mix is fascinating. There are the carefully made documentaries (like Ford's Battle of Midway or Wyler's Memphis Belle) and the instructional shorts, episodes of Capra's extraordinary multi-part propaganda series Why We Fight and entertainments with propaganda elements (Mrs. Miniver, Across the Pacific), the more personal pictures made during the war that deal with it from an oblique perspective (The Long Voyage Home, The More the Merrier, Meet John Doe), the films that took a hard look at the aftermath of the war (Best Years, Huston's remarkable documentary Let There Be Light, which was commissioned and then suppressed by the army), and some of the pictures they made in the years to come. A great series, based on a tremendous book.

by Martin Scorsese