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: Short & Sweet - 100 Terrific Movies Less Than 75 Minutes Long (Wednesdays in October)--Is there such a thing as a standard running time for movies? If you asked the average person, the answer would probably be something between 90 and 100 minutes. But in truth, if you consider the entire history of cinema thus far, you find movies of all shapes and sizes and lengths, from Stan Brakhage's early one and two-minute films to Mariano Llinás' recent 807-minute La Flor. The first films from the Lumières, Méliès and Edison among others were a minute or just over. One-reelers, about 10 minutes in length, were followed by two-reelers, then what came to be known as "feature length" didn't begin until the teens. I suppose that the standard running time really solidified at some point in the '30s, and from that time on some interesting variations and possibilities opened up. In one sense, whether a running time is longer or shorter than usual, you're dealing with the same questions of balance, concision, tension, emotion, flow... A short, fast-paced film can be boring, and a long and leisurely paced film can be riveting. But the best of the pictures included here made creative virtues out of their short lengths, mandated by the studios--for instance, the pre-Code titles made at Warner Bros. in the early 1930s--when directors like Michael Curtiz (The Walking Dead, The Kennel Murder Case), Roy Del Ruth (Captured, Taxi! , Employee's Entrance, Beauty and the Boss), William Wellman (Midnight Mary, Lilly Turner, Star Witness), William Dieterle (Fog Over Frisco, Jewel Robbery) and Mervyn LeRoy (Three On a Match, High Pressure) were each directing six or seven movies a year to satisfy the demand in theatres; or the films produced by Val Lewton at RKO (three are included here: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and Mademoiselle Fifi), which were meant to play on the bottom halves of double bills but (in the case of Cat People) sometimes out grossed the A pictures; or the pictures that Roger Corman made for the drive-in market (included here are two of his very best: Little Shop of Horrors, shot over a weekend, and Bucket of Blood). These pictures were all made very quickly on extremely low budgets and tight schedules, and the speed with which they were made is part of what gives them their energy and their powerful simplicity; or, in the case of the Lewton films, their visual beauty and power and poetry. It's interesting that Robert Wise, who directed Mademoiselle Fifi (and another Lewton film, Curse of the Cat People), later directed The Set-Up, also included in this program and a very different kind of film: a portrait of a down and out boxer (played brilliantly by Robert Ryan) in which the unfolding time of the story is exactly the same as the film's running time. In other words, real unity of time. And, there are many other remarkable films in this program, including Detour, One-Way Passage, Hell's Heroes, Ride Lonesome and The Bank Dick. They're all lessons in telling stories with a camera.

by Martin Scorsese