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.

NORMAN LLOYD'S 102ND BIRTHDAY (November 8, 8pm)--On the day that I was born in 1942, the actor and director Norman Lloyd had just celebrated his 28th birthday. He was already a veteran of the theatre, starting in 1933 as an apprentice in Eva Le Galliene's Civic Repertory, and he had just made his debut in movies as the actual saboteur in Alfred Hitchcock's film of that name. 74 years later, Lloyd will be celebrating another birthday--his 102nd. He turned in his driver's license only two years ago and he stopped playing tennis after a fall last year, but he's still working: he appeared in Trainwreck by Judd Apatow just last year. He's also sharper than most people in their 20s, let alone their 90s and beyond, and he's a living historical resource. Lloyd wasn't just standing on the sidelines when great things happened. He worked in the left-wing Theatre of Action and the Federal Theatre Project (in the productions known as "Living Newspapers") with Joseph Losey. He played Cinna the Poet in Orson Welles' legendary anti-fascist version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar--Richard Linklater made a lovely picture set during the preparation for that production, Me and Orson Welles, in which Leo Bill plays Lloyd. He appeared in one of the last Group Theatre productions, directed by Elia Kazan. He acted for, and became a close friend of, Chaplin and Jean Renoir. He became a close associate of Hitchcock, who hired him as an Associate Producer on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, of which he directed many episodes. He also directed a beautiful series of half-hour pieces for the television series Omnibus in the early '50s, written by James Agee (some of them are lost, but there is a condensed version available on DVD), with a little second-unit work (around the area of Lincoln's birthplace in Kentucky) shot by a young photographer and aspiring director named Stanley Kubrick. When I had the honor of working with Norman Lloyd over 20 years ago on The Age of Innocence, he was everything you want in an actor. He was an absolute professional and a meticulous artist, who understood what I needed and executed it perfectly. He knew the material inside and out, and he kept us all entertained in between takes with stories of his time with Welles and Renoir and Chaplin. It's a memory that I treasure. TCM is celebrating Lloyd's birthday with a presentation of a talk that he did with Ben Mankiewicz at this year's TCM Classic Film Festival and a selection of four of his very best pictures as an actor: Chaplin's Limelight, Renoir's The Southerner (his best American picture), The Black Book by Anthony Mann (shot by John Alton and designed by William Cameron Menzies) and, of course, Saboteur.

TCM SPOTLIGHT: TO TELL THE TRUTH (Mondays and Wednesdays in November)--I would also like to mention TCM's wide-ranging month-long salute to documentary filmmaking, covering the whole history of one of the richest veins in cinema, from the Lumière Brothers at the dawn of the art form through the silent documentary explorations of Robert Flaherty and Cooper and Schoedsack; classics of the '30s by John Grierson, Pare Lorentz and Joris Ivens; the war documentaries of the '40s by John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler and others; Alain Resnais' Night and Fog, Lionel Rogosin's Come Back, Africa and Jean Rouch and Edgard Morin's Chronicle of a Summer and Robert Drew's Primary, all groundbreaking pictures; Salesman, Woodstock, The Battle of Chile, Harlan County USA, Burden of Dreams, The Times of Harvey Milk, Hoop Dreams and Crumb, and many, many others.

by Martin Scorsese