Actor, comedian, writer and pratfall practitioner extraordinaire Chevy Chase is our Guest Programmer for January. After perfecting his deadpan comedy style on TV's Saturday Night Live, Chase embarked on a highly successful film career highlighted by 1980's Caddyshack and the National Lampoon and Fletch movies. He continues to star in film comedies such as Funny Money and Goose on the Loose.

Chase joins TCM host Robert Osborne to discuss the reasoning behind his sometimes-surprising programming picks. Chase considers David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) "one of the greatest films," in part because the director brought epic scope and fantastic landscapes to the screen "long before they used what we call CGI, computer graphic imaging... and, of course, Peter [O'Toole] was brilliant." The Gold Rush (1925) is a Chase choice because, aside from his own father, "the funniest man who ever lived," Charlie Chaplin was his greatest influence. "If you know my work you know I have done a lot of physical comedy, and I adored Chaplin for that...he was a genius."

As a Libra who sees both sides of a story and believes in "putting my feet in the other guy's shoes," Chase is fascinated by the Akira Kurosawa classic Rashomon (1950), which recounts a violent episode from multiple and conflicting viewpoints. A veteran of skits on Saturday Night Live with John Belushi that kidded the tendency of Japanese performers to overact, Chase considers Rashomon star Toshiro Mifune a "great actor" because he was "so real."

by Roger Fristoe