Fifteen years after the American transcontinental railway was completed, construction began on the Canadian Pacific Railway to connect British Columbia to Eastern Canada. For the purposes of the 1949 film Canadian Pacific, it’s simply a setting for a western in the mountains and forests of western Canada, where the challenge of finding a route through the Rocky Mountains is compounded by the opposition of local trappers and Indian tribes. It is, shall we say, a portrait that refuses to let history dictate the details of the story.

Randolph Scott stars as Tom Andrews, the buckskin-clad surveyor and “trouble boss,” a kind of foreman who has an instinct for spotting troublemakers and intervening in a very physical way before they have a chance to make any trouble. Scott plays Tom as a classic Scott cowboy: ramrod straight, with a big smile, quick fists, and fast draw. He instantly clashes with the railway’s new doctor, Edith Cabot (Jane Wyatt), a cultured pacifist who abhors violence, before returning to Cecille (Nancy Olson), the frontier girl he met in the local trapper settlements while searching for the pass. It’s a classic dichotomy: the man of the west torn between the wild frontier gal and the civilized society woman. In this pairing, trapper’s daughter Olson is the gentler, more romantic of the two, while Wyatt plays the doctor as a fiery, obstinate woman under the corset and severe speeches.

Needless to say, circumstances toss Tom together with Edith while Cecille’s people are whipped up into an anti-railway frenzy by the wonderfully-named villain Dirk Rourke (Victor Jory), a fur trader who fears his monopoly on the trading posts will be broken by the railway. Stir in stolen dynamite, Indian tribes on the warpath, and liquor-induced labor unrest, and you’ve got a war over the rails. Prolific character actor J. Carrol Naish, usually relegated to roles as villains or even Indians, provides color and comic relief as the sourdough Dynamite Dawson, an old coot with a bushy beard who drawls tall tales (“I once won the Kentucky Derby!”) as the railway munitions man and Tom’s most trusted ally.

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Plays on Saturday, May 11 on TCM

Urban black culture meets Asian martial arts philosophy meets music video glamor in The Last Dragon, a colorful, comic, self-aware reworking of a classic Hong Kong martial arts odyssey in contemporary New York. Call it a Motown martial arts movie seeped in New York urban culture and eighties color and music.

Real-life karate black belt Taimak plays earnest young martial arts student Leroy Green, nicknamed Bruce Lee-roy by the locals. He models himself on Bruce Lee, dresses in a modest black robe and an Asian straw hat, eats popcorn with chopsticks, spouts fortune cookie wisdom, and talks in the formal, polite manner of screen Asians who speak English in American movies without contractions (it’s always “do not,” never “don’t”). Needless to say, he stands out amidst the street smart characters of his Harlem neighborhood and his hip kid brother (future rapper Leo O’Brien, founding member of The Sugarhill Gang) thinks he’s just weird. Music video TV host and singer Laura Charles (Vanity), however, thinks he’s perfectly charming, especially after he saves her from mob-wannabe thugs not once but twice. Meanwhile a trash-talking peacock of a martial arts gangleader named Sho’nuff, the self-proclaimed Shogun of Harlem (Julius J. Carry III), spends the film trying to pressure Leroy into a fight to prove once and for all that he’s the master.

“The rest of the plot, which has to do with Vanity’s resisting gangland pressure to play rotten videos in her dance club, is too idiotic to bear explaining,” wrote Janet Maslin in her review for The New York Times, which was indicative of the reviews of the day. Arriving just as hip-hop, rap, break-dancing, and graffiti art were getting a spotlight in scrappy little films with serious cultural undercurrents like Breakin’ and Beat Street (Schultz himself would make Krush Groove a year later), The Last Dragon was a fun-loving movie fantasy, pure and simple. Its mix of action, comedy, music, dance, revenge movie, and spiritual odyssey was not well reviewed but it was embraced by audiences, who turned it into a small-scale hit. Decades later, it remains a cult film with passionate fans.

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Plays on TCM on Saturday, April 13

Henri-Georges Clouzot made his reputation as a director of coldly corrosive, meticulously-engineered thrillers, but he made his debut with the snappy, witty, screwball murder mystery The Murderer Lives at Number 21. You could call it a continental answer to MGM’s The Thin Man films — it has a sophisticated detective, a spunky girlfriend who joins him on his cases, and plenty of witty banter — but there is also a wry cynicism under the cheeky humor and a decidedly French attitude to sexual mores.

Clouzot had been working in the film industry since the early 1930s, apprenticing as an assistant to directors Anatole Litvak and E.A. Dupont and writing or co-writing scripts in both France and Germany. By the early forties he had become a specialist in French thrillers and among his successes was The Last One of the Six (Le dernier des six), a light 1941 murder mystery made for Continental, a German film company that established itself in France during the occupation. Adapted from a novel by Stanislas-André Steeman and directed by Georges Lacombe, the film starred Pierre Fresnay as Inspector Wenceslas Woroboyioetschik, aka Wens of the Paris police, and Suzy Delair as Mila Malou, aspiring singer and Wens’ saucy lover. Clouzot forged strong friendships with Fresnay (Clouzot once said that Fresnay helped him more than anyone else in his lifetime) and Delair, who became his companion during the production and even made suggestions to the script, over the course of production, and the film’s success led to a promotion for Clouzot — he was made head of Continental’s screenwriter department — and a chance to direct his first feature.

The Murderer Lives at Number 21, also based on a novel by Steeman, reunites Clouzot with Fresnay and Delair. Though Wens and Mila are not characters in the novel, Clouzot wrote them into the leading roles of the mystery of a serial killer who leaves his calling card with every corpse. The name Monsieur Durand becomes notorious on the streets, like a boogeyman, but in this case a very real one. While Wens goes undercover, moving into a rooming house where he believes the killer lives (thus the film’s title) under the guise of a minister, Mila embarks on her own investigation for purely professional reasons: Nabbing the killer would make her famous and kick-start her singing career. Clouzot writes Wens as a sly, quick-witted investigator, sharper than his bosses and more clever than his suspects, and Fresnay plays him as a man who spars with words like a fencer with a foil. Where Fresnay’s sophisticated Wens outmaneuvers his opponents with verbal dexterity and wit, Delair’s street-smart Mila is a dizzy force of nature who bowls them over by sheer force of personality and determination. Their lively relationship is defined by the sardonic byplay between the characters, who are not married but clearly live together.

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Plays on TCM on Sunday, April 7.

The World War II spy thriller 13 Rue Madeleine (1947) is built around no less than the creation of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services). A newsreel-like prologue that recounts the origins of the military intelligence network that later became the CIA, put together from the ground up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor with military and civilian recruits alike, segues from documentary to docudrama to follow a team of agents from their initial training to a vital mission in Nazi-occupied France. The film takes its name from the address of Gestapo headquarters in the port city of Le Havre on the Normandy coast, a location that dominates the finale of the film, and builds its fictional mission on the real threat of the German V-1 missiles and the Allied campaign of misinformation in the lead-up to D-Day.

13 Rue Madeleine was the second feature from producer Louis de Rochemont, who previously spent a decade producing the “March of Time” newsreel series, the most widely seen non-fiction films on American screens. In many ways it is an unofficial sequel to his feature debut The House on 92nd Street (1945), a wartime espionage thriller based on the real-life case of the FBI tracking down a ring of German spies in New York City. De Rochemont’s background informed the film: it was based on a true story and largely shot on location, and the espionage drama, which was defined as much by the workaday procedure of the American agents as by the melodramatic storyline and the exotic danger of covert spies and double agents, was framed by authoritative narration. De Rochemont and director Henry Hathaway brought a realist aesthetic to the studio thriller and reunited with screenwriter John Monks, Jr., narrator Reed Hadley, and veteran cinematographer Norbert Brodine for 13 Rue Madeleine. Brodine’s mix of natural light, location shooting, and “you are there” docu-drama compositions with heightened, expressionist lighting and dramatic angles to build tension in key scenes helped define de Rochemont’s influential approach.

James Cagney plays Bob Sharkey, a founder of America’s new counter-intelligence agency. The character was originally modeled on OSS founder William “Wild Bill” Donovan, but Donovan objected to the film’s portrayal of the agency. The organization was renamed 077 in the film and similarities to Donovan were obscured in rewrites. Cagney had formed Cagney Productions with his brother, Bill, in 1942, and was still under contract to Warner Bros., but he took time out to take the lead in 13 Rue Madeleine for Fox, partly as a favor to Darryl Zanuck and partly for a generous paycheck to help float his struggling production company.

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Plays on Thursday, March 14 on TCM

In Hollywood of the early 1930s, no one epitomized the romantic charm of France and continental sophistication of Paris better than Maurice Chevalier. The popular singer and nightclub entertainer had made his American film debut in the early sound era, where his boulevardier persona and lilting accent helped make him a major star in Ernst Lubitsch’s witty musical comedies.

But Chevalier was getting tired of playing what he called “the same old fellow,” the seductive Frenchman sweeping women off their feet and into bed with a smile and wink, and he was battling Irving Thalberg over his MGM assignments when Fox producer Darryl F. Zanuck offered him the lead in Folies Bergre de Paris (1935), a musical comedy that moves from the Paris stage to the world of high society and high finance and back. Zanuck had negotiated the film rights for the legendary Paris show palace and developed the film (based on the play The Red Cat) for Charles Boyer. When Boyer declined, Chevalier took the part.

The film offered Chevalier the opportunity to play two different roles: Folies Bergre headliner Eugene Charlier, a singer famed for his impersonation of Parisian millionaire Baron Fernand Cassini, and the banker and notorious womanizer Cassini himself. British beauty Merle Oberon (in one of her earliest American films) co-stars as Cassini’s wife in “the perfect modern marriage” (they each go their own way) and Ann Sothern is Charlier’s pathologically jealous girlfriend. The two men flirt with one another’s partners, of course, but the play of mistaken and swapped identities gets comically complicated as identities are swapped back and forth and the women use the confusion to play their own games.

The choreography by Dave Gould is right out of the Busby Berkeley playbook, with sets that expand back from the proscenium arch of the physical stage into impossibly epic spaces, dancers that multiply into small armies, overhead cameras that look down on a chorus forming elaborate geometric patterns, and increasingly abstract and surreal sets. The opening number sends Chevalier dancing through a downpour that covers half the stage, and the film ends with the Academy Award-winning “Straw Hat” number, an elaborate set piece built around Chevalier’s trademark boater hat, which becomes the basis for crazy props and massive sets inspired by the texture of the simple straw hat.

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Plays on Thursday, March 7 on TCM

The fugitive couple on the run is a classic film noir trope, a situation steeped in romance and desperation and dreams and doom, from Fritz Lang’s tormented lovers in the proto-noir You Only Live Once (1937) to the innocence trampled in They Live by Night (1948) to the l’amour fou detonated in Gun Crazy (1950).

Tomorrow Is Another Day is a low-key take on the situation starring Steve Cochran as Bill Clark, a 34-year-old man who leaves prison after serving more than half his life behind bars, and Ruth Roman as Cay, a hard-shell dame at a dime-a-dance joint mixed up with a corrupt cop. A bad bounce of fate sends both of them on the road, two strangers tossed together on the run from a murder rap as. The story could have easily slipped into the cliche of the innocent corrupted by the predatory femme fatale, but there’s much more to both characters in this unassuming thriller directed by Felix Feist.

Ex-con and social naif Bill is a lamb in an urban culture of wolves (“I guess I’m the patsy this time,” he mumbles, resigned to getting the short end of every situation) and Cay has been hardened by years of getting knocked around and making a living off her looks. Both are slow to trust, but once they start, it softens both of their shells and inspires both of them to tough out a hard life of manual labor rather than turn back to their previous lives. For a film in the bleak culture of noir, it’s one of the more hopeful portraits of love among the damned.

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Plays on Turner Classic Movies on Thursday, January 17

A disparate collection of crooks, small-time hustlers, and disreputable characters knocking around Monte Carlo are brought together to rob a casino in an elaborate heist in Seven Thieves (1960), an unshowy caper film from Hollywood veteran Henry Hathaway. Edward G. Robinson plays the mastermind of the job, Theo Wilkins, a once-respected scientist whose career foundered after serving time for theft, and Rod Steiger plays his loyal friend, partner, and right hand Paul Mason, a sophisticated career criminal brought over by Theo to run the untrustworthy crew.

The film was promoted by Fox as “Little Caesar meets Al Capone,” referring to the pairing of old school gangster star Robinson with method actor (and Al Capone star) Steiger. In fact, Theo is much closer to another Robinson role from his gangster past: The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938), where Robinson’s titular doctor joins a criminal gang to research his book and ends up plotting their robberies. Theo could be Clitterhouse twenty years later, an old pro more interested in the mechanics and execution of the perfect plan than the money.

Joan Collins plays the key to their scheme, a stripper in a second-rate nightclub where the nervous assistant director of Monte Carlo’s biggest casino arrives nightly to watch her dance, and Eli Wallach is her mentor and mother hen Poncho, who blows the saxophone (and at one point becomes a partner in her routine) in the club’s jazz combo. The team is filled out by Michael Dante as the grinning safecracker, Berry Kroeger as the driver and team muscle, and Alexander Scourby as the reluctant partner inside the club, the casino assistant director pressured by Collins to be their inside man.

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Plays on Turner Classic Movies on Tuesday, January 8

The Lady of That Lady in Ermine (1948), the final film from legendary director Ernst Lubitsch, may be 300 years old at the start of movie but she looks remarkably alive in the painting that dominates the castle at the center of the story. In fact, she’s downright restless as she smiles at observers and steps out to confer and sing with the subjects of the paintings around her. She is Francesca, played with a gusto more American than continental by Betty Grable, and she is a national hero in the adorable (and completely fictional) little Principality of Bergamo for saving castle and country from invaders in the 16th century. Grable also plays the beautiful Countess Angelina, Francesca’s descendant, who faces another invasion on her wedding day. With the future of Bergamo at stake, the spirit of Francesca is roused from the painting to once again make the ultimate sacrifice and save her kingdom and castle through romance and song.

Ernst Lubitsch was a living legend when he embarked on That Lady in Ermine in 1947. He had directed some of the most elegant and beloved comedies in the American cinema, from Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Design for Living (1933) to The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and Ninotchka (1939), and had even run Paramount Studio for a year. His distinctive mix of sophisticated comedy, slapstick, sexiness and innuendo was branded “the Lubitsch touch” throughout the industry. He brought that quality to That Lady in Ermine, a lightweight musical romance based on an operetta with an old Europe setting and a dramatis personae filled with witty royals, handsome soldiers, and wily servants.

Lubitsch first started developing an adaptation in 1943 as a vehicle for Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. By 1947, 20th Century Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck thought the story would be a fine way to relaunch Betty Grable, a light musical comedienne and all-American girl famed for her million dollar legs, in a more sophisticated role. Grable was the studio’s top box-office draw and Zanuck thought that working with a director of Lubitsch’s caliber would add prestige to her popularity. He promoted the project to a lavish Technicolor production and gave Lubitsch the biggest budget of his career.

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Plays on Friday, December 28 on TCM

Friends and aspiring filmmakers Richard Blackburn and Robert Fern were UCLA film school graduates looking to make their mark on the filmmaking world. It was the early seventies and they figured that the best way to get into moviemaking was to make their own low-budget horror film. Vampires were big again, notably the lesbian-chic vampires of The Velvet Vampire and Daughters of Darkness (both 1971), and it seemed a natural. But Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973) is no conventional vampire horror or sexploitation knock-off. “It fell between the cracks of art film and exploitation film,” observed Blackburn, looking back on the film in 2004.

Set in the Depression-era South, it opens like a rural gangster movie and detours into a drama of religious hypocrisy before becoming a sinister Alice in Wonderland. Cheryl Smith stars as the innocent Lila Lee, the young, virginal daughter of a vicious gangster and wife killer. Taken in by a tormented Baptist minister (director Richard Blackburn himself) who praises her innocence while fighting his desire for her, she runs away to the mysterious Lemora (Lesley Gilb), who promises to reunite her with her father. Young and trusting, fragile yet determined, this blond, freckled girl is the model of a guileless child on the verge of womanhood, Candide by way of Alice, but instead of a wonderland she wanders a corrupt world of wicked people and undead monsters.

Director Richard Blackburn and producer Robert Fern co-wrote the original screenplay together and produced the film on a tiny budget with a crew of friends, fellow film students, and a few professionals. They turn Pomona, California into a small southern town of the prohibition era with little more than carefully chosen locations, a few period cars, well-dressed sets and evocative costumes, and create an eerie, dislocated atmosphere deep in the woods, where ghouls prowl and prey upon anyone who wanders into the haunted forest. The make-up effects are often less convincing as the production stretched its resources to meet Blackburn’s ambitions. “I never told him that many of his concepts were beyond his budget,” recalls make-up artist Byrd Holland, “instead, the crew and I managed to give him what he wanted.”

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Plays on Friday, December 14 on TCM

The final film by Robert Aldrich, the hard-edged American director of such tough-guy classics as Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The Dirty Dozen (1967), drops the underdog sports drama into the barnstorming world of women’s tag team wrestling on the rural circuit for a meandering, comic look at the intersection of sports, show business, and big dreams.

Iris and Molly (Vicki Frederick and Laurene Landon), who fight professionally as the California Dolls, and manager / promoter Harry Sears (Peter Falk) hustle their way through small-time matches, hostile crowds, crummy motel rooms and lousy burger joints in the American Midwest with an eye on the big time: the championship match in Reno. While they struggle to maintain their dignity (which comes under assault when they’re booked into a county fair mud wrestling match), Harry plays the crusty but paternal veteran manager keeping them going with a mix of tough love and inspirational speeches, all delivered with Falk’s gravelly voice, street-smart attitude, and wry humor.

Think Kansas City Bomber (1972) meets Rocky (1976) by way of a buddy road movie.This culture is as much show business fakery and ballyhoo as it is working class sports spectacle, a mix of big, broad wrestling theater (right down to scripted turnarounds and manufactured rivalries) and cheesecake fashion show with tough, sexy women in wrestling tights that could pass for bathing suits. In between, Harry and the girls banter while driving along the highways of America’s rust belt in a broken-down car. Robert Aldrich was no stranger to sports stories in unusual cultures — his The Longest Yard (1974) turns on a football game between semi-pro prison guards and a team of convicts put together for an exhibition match and is as much about dignity and self-respect as it is about victory — but for all the drama of rigged matches and corrupt bookers, he applies a lighter touch to this story.

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Plays on Friday, December 7 on Turner Classic Movies

Based on a story by Rex Beach, Son of the Gods (1930) is an early sound-era drama of racism in the “civilized” society of the rich and sophisticated in America and Europe. A stoic Richard Barthelmess, playing with even more restraint than usual, stars as Sam Lee, who we first see as the star player of an Ivy League polo team. He’s rich, smart, cultured, studious, and generous, seemingly the all-American ideal, and yet he’s reluctant to join his college buddies on a triple date with a trio of girls. “Do you think it will be all right?” he asks, warily yet hopefully. “Do you think they’ll understand?” He asks because Sam Lee is not American. He’s descended from Chinese royalty, the son of Lee Ying (E. Alyn Warren), who runs a vast financial empire from his headquarters in New York. In 1930 America, that simply marks Sam as “a Chinaman,” or as one sneering, intolerant debutante spits out, “a chink.”

Yes, Barthelmess doesn’t look like he has a drop of Asian blood in him and the filmmakers don’t add any make-up enhancements (as Griffith did when Barthelmess played a young Chinese immigrant in Broken Blossoms, 1919). While it may seem an oversight, it actually serves the point of the film. His politeness and seriousness instantly impress people and women are certainly attracted by his good looks and generosity. It is only when they discover his lineage that their attitude changes. That small-minded bigotry is finally too much for Sam and, with his father’s blessing, he drops out of college to make the world his classroom, working his way across the globe to get a different kind of education.

Constance Bennett is Allana Wagner, a sophisticated and worldly American heiress in Europe with her protective father. Through an improbable set of coincidences, Sam lands in the lap of high society in casinos and night spots of the Riviera and is soon romancing Allana, who covets and requires a lot of attention. But along with the issue of his “secret” – is she as free from prejudice as she proclaims? – Son of the Gods throws out all sorts of complications on his road to happiness and acceptance: illness, death, disillusionment, retribution, and more secrets.

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Plays Tuesday, November 6 on Turner Classic Movies. Not on home video.