In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive new monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese.

BURT LANCASTER BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE (November 2, Daytime) - Burt Lancaster was a remarkable, complex presence. He was big, physically imposing, muscular but graceful. Lancaster was a trained acrobat (early on, before he sustained a serious injury, he had an act with his childhood friend Nick Cravat, who appeared in many of his pictures). It shows in his performances - in his gestures and his sense of his body as a rhythmic instrument. He was also sensitive, to a degree that could be frightening - he could crush you with his bare hands, but you could kill him with a cutting remark or a slight. He also had an air of refinement and discernment. He was known as "Mr. Muscles and Teeth," and he himself referred to his formidable, flashing smile as "The Grin," but like Robert Ryan he could never really be easily defined or encapsulated by publicity departments. TCM is doing a fine tribute to him on what would have been his 98th birthday, focused on the first two decades of his career. They're including his extraordinary debut in Robert Siodmak's expansion of Hemingway's The Killers, where he has an almost otherworldly beauty; The Flame and the Arrow, Jacques Tourneur's beautiful medieval adventure story in glorious Technicolor (Cravat appears in that one) and Trapeze, Carol Reed's circus picture, where you get a vivid sense of Lancaster's acrobatic prowess; From Here to Eternity, one of the most beloved pictures of the 50s; and Sweet Smell of Success, one of the many unusual projects that Lancaster produced, one of his greatest roles, and one of the high points of American cinema.

JUGGERNAUT (November 17, 9:45pm ET) - The 1970s was the decade of the disaster movie. Starting with The Poseidon Adventure in 1972, it seemed like there was a new picture every six months (most of them produced by Irwin Allen) in which an earthquake or a swarm of killer bees was the real center of attention, while the all-star casts (the posters usually featured a line of actors' stills running along the bottom) seemed to split up screen time in equal portions. These pictures were a lot of fun and most of them were very well crafted (I remember a kind of cottage industry revolving around sociological and psychoanalytic explanations for their massive popularity). Right in the middle of the cycle, Richard Lester made this tough, tense, funny, and visually intricate picture about an ocean liner with several bombs planted on board. This is one of those films where the director entered the project late in the game and brought a fresh response, energizing the material in the process (Queen of Spades by Thorold Dickinson and Songwriter by Alan Rudolph are two other examples that come to mind). The plot is fairly familiar, but the details are what make the picture so riveting: the rough weather on the North Sea (the cast and the extras were taken on an actual cruise), the scale of the ocean liner against the horizon, the hazardous difficulties of getting the bomb experts (led by Richard Harris, in an excellent performance) out of a chopper, into the rough waters and onto the ship, the almost impossible task of locating and defusing the bombs. And, Juggernaut has a powerful frankness about imminent mortality - you really feel that they may not make it. A surprising picture, and a rewarding one.