Paying tribute to TCM's 15th Anniversary this year, Time magazine's film critic Richard Corliss recently wrote a very flattering piece about our network, listing what he feels are "15 Reasons to Love Turner Classic Movies." (Thanks also, Richard, for calling TCM "an essential part of our culture, our own American cinematheque.") Coming in at number seven, Corliss salutes our annual "Summer Under the Stars" festival which we've been doing for the past six years, devoting each day in August to a different star for twenty-four hours. (For the record, the first one we singled out was Jimmy Stewart on Aug. 1, 2003.)

One aspect Richard Corliss particularly praised about these star-a-day mini-marathons is the fact that TCM, in his words, "often spotlights less obvious names, actors whose careers merit a close look." It will indeed be that way again this year as we include on our list seventeen famous faces we're singling out for the first time, among them a wide array of talented stalwarts too often overlooked in tributes, including Jean Arthur, Ida Lupino, James Mason, Sterling Hayden, Merle Oberon, Dirk Bogarde, Claire Bloom, Marion Davies, Miriam Hopkins, Harold Lloyd and Red Skelton. Other first-timers are Academy Award winners Jennifer Jones, Gene Hackman, Fredric March, Yul Brynner, Gloria Grahame and James Coburn, mixed in with fourteen returnees who never wear out their welcome, among them Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Judy Garland, Cary Grant and John Wayne.

Even when stalwarts return who we've saluted in previous years, we'll often be including films in their lineups which we've never shown before. For instance, on our Aug. 1 day-and-night with Henry Fonda, we'll include our first-ever showing of Fonda's great 1940 triumph The Grapes of Wrath, immediately followed by the TCM premiere of the film in which Fonda made his debut, 1935's The Farmer Takes a Wife. When we salute Deborah Kerr on Aug. 15, one of the Kerr films will be the first TCM airing of what may be the most romantic movie yet made, 1957's An Affair to Remember; we'll also have the first TCM showing of a British film Deborah made in 1942 called The Avengers (aka The Day Will Dawn). During our Aug. 11 tribute to Audrey Hepburn there will be two early Hepburn films we've not previously screened: 1951's Laughter in Paradise and 1952's The Secret People, both made before Audrey's spectacular "overnight" success of 1953.

The month will, in fact, be abounding with TCM premieres, 43 in total, among them many wanna-see titles from Britain (including The Wicked Lady, The Servant, Doctor in the House, The Divorce of Lady X, The Lion Has Wings, Waltz of the Toreadors, Two-Way Stretch), also William Wyler's vastly underrated Carrie from 1952 (no relation to the horror tale) with Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones, 1935's Les Misérables, 1976's Futureworld, 1988's Mississippi Burning, and many, many more. To borrow a title from a movie we'll be showing on Aug. 13, we think this year's "Summer Under the Stars" edition comes close to being The Greatest Show on Earth. We hope you'll agree.

by Robert Osborne