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.

THERE ARE A FEW DIFFERENT THEMES running through this month's programing on TCM, including a month-long tribute to Christopher Lee, whose work I love and whose presence I miss (I was lucky enough to work with him on Hugo). There's a program of five pictures celebrating the birthday of the great Carole Lombard (Oct. 6). And, of course, there are two programming threads running throughout the month: politics and horror. Making a good movie about politics is like trying to catch running water with your hands. Politics is ceaseless human change on massive level--civic, state, national, global--and "political" movies are really studies of political milieux, in particular places at particular historical moments. Take Advise & Consent (October 19, 10pm), Otto Preminger's 1962 adaptation of conservative novelist Allen Drury's immensely popular Washington roman à clef (with characters based on Joseph McCarthy, Alger Hiss and Senator Lester Hunt, who committed suicide in his office in 1954). The "issues" at stake in the picture are vague, generic, the equivalent of Hitchcock's Macguffin. The picture is really a character study, but the character is a group, a social set, rather than an individual: the political class of Washington in the late '50s and early '60s. The film is about the way they move and gather and converse, the way they get business done and consolidate power, the breakfasts and parties, the trysts and "understandings," the impromptu meetings in back rooms and on underground rides from one end of the capitol building to the other. Preminger was brilliant at casting: the aging Hollywood stars playing senators, statesmen, Washington matrons and power brokers--an all-star cast including Walter Pidgeon, Gene Tierney, Charles Laughton, Henry Fonda, Franchot Tone, Peter Lawford and Lew Ayres, a dead ringer for George Bush, Sr., as the Vice President--are all in perfect sync, temperamentally and physically, with the characters they're playing. John Ford also cast older Hollywood stars and character actors in The Last Hurrah (October 26, 8pm), again based on a roman à clef (by writer Edwin O'Connor), but with the focus this time on local (Boston-Irish) rather than national politics. Ford's movie is about the end of the line for a longtime Boston mayor (Spencer Tracy) and his way of getting the job done. Like many late Ford pictures, it's about the end of a way of life. There are quite a few horror films being shown this month, but I keep going back to the pictures that Val Lewton produced at RKO in the 40s. I've covered those films more than once in this column, so why re-visit them? I suppose it's because I often find myself thinking about them, recalling certain images and passages, and then being moved to take a fresh look--and each time, they become more resonant and surprising. Lewton and his production unit made eight horror films between 1942 and 1946 (the only one not being shown is The Seventh Victim), from Cat People (October 31, 7:15am) to Bedlam (October 29, 9am), all of them shot very quickly on a miniscule budget. They are lessons in simplicity and economy of expression, but they are also much more than that. Each and every one of them contains a passage or passages that quietly embody and express the uncanny terror, or joy, or sheer amazement, of just being here. They are very special pictures, and they will always be with me.

by Martin Scorsese