Turner Classic Movies’ annual weekend programming shows how one American institution intentionally finds a powerful way to draw attention to the most solemn of national holidays.
Most holidays are celebrated. But a few deserve, more so, to be marked, or commemorated—which is how Memorial Day should be contemplated and treated.
It’s a challenge. Considered the unofficial launch of summer—those lazy, hazy, crazy days of soda and pretzels and beer, and seersucker—Memorial Day to many means barbeques and suds and the Indianapolis 500 on the last Monday of May. It deserves better.
In various ways, it gets it. Solemnity honoring those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country finds a way: church services, the wearing of poppies, and placing flags at veterans’ graves, particularly at U.S. military cemeteries, are among the means by which Americans and voluntary associations show deserved respect for the day.
An unorthodox way Americans have come to mark not only the day, but the longer weekend, comes courtesy of Turner Classic Movies. This year, as it has done for so many years prior, TCM will again dedicate its schedule to showing dozens of war movies, ranging from those of actual combat to those which deal with the consequences of war.
TCM’s relentless dedication to Memorial Day—via the weekend cinematic festival—has become one of the more noteworthy ways an American media institution diligently marks this most-serious holiday. TCM’s 2025 series begins on Friday, May 23, with The Best Years of Our Lives, one of the more acclaimed films ever produced—a poignant tale of three servicemen and their post-combat dealing with readjustment to life back home. It bookends in the wee hours of Tuesday, May 27, with the lone comedy of the programming, the smart and funny Kelly's Heroes. Some 40 movies are squeezed in between.
Most are set in World War II. Seeing TCM’s lineup, and what’s not included—The Longest Day, In Which We Serve, They Were Expendable, Pork Chop Hill, Patton, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Das Boot, to name but a few—makes one realize the vastness of the genre.
And even with that vastness, while World War II films are plentiful, there is thin fare for other American conflicts. Hollywood has not seen fit to give other critical conflicts their cinematic bevy. What, for example, are the great Revolutionary War films? Take your time answering.
Or Civil War films? Yes—there is Glory. And Gettysburg.
And there is The Red Badge of Courage, the 1951 black-and-white classic directed by John Huston. Famously hatcheted and sliced by MGM’s management, reducing Huston’s 120-minute original (lost!) take on Stephen Crane’s beloved novel to a mere 69 minutes, the end product, no matter its scars, remains a powerful film.
It always seems to make the cut: Starring Audie Murphy—America’s most-decorated soldier, who turned to Hollywood after leaving the battlefields of Europe—and Bill Mauldin, the famous Stars and Stripes cartoonist, The Red Badge of Courage will be on the TCM Memorial Day Weekend schedule.
If this opinionated writer could urge you to watch any one of the films being shown, it would be this one. Heavy on the combat, one of the movie’s deeper messages—whether intended or not—is about healing. Immediately following the pivotal battle, the captured Rebels are surrounded and confronted by the prevailing Yankees. The blood is up—shouldn’t hate prevail? Instead of the bitterness that current leftist, statue-toppling America would demand the victor have over the vanquished, there is a sense in The Red Badge of Courage of diplomacy, and even friendliness and potential camaraderie, between the men who were shooting at each other a minute earlier.
Most poignant is the brief scene near the movie’s conclusion where Murphy’s character, Henry, the Union flag bearer who has captured the Stars and Bars from the dying Rebel standard-bearer, holds it over him, the wind giving the banner a funereal role, a blanket of dignity honoring the deceased.
(If you can’t catch the movie on TCM this weekend, you can find it here.)
The TCM cavalcade begs bingeing, not merely for entertainment. Catching a few of the films—most of them pretty good, some (A Walk in the Sun, about the first actions of a company of soldiers after a beach landing in Italy, Battleground, about Bastogne, and The Bridge on the River Kwai, David Lean’s classic British POW tale) exceptionally so—may give one pause, may instill the meant spirit of the holiday, and may provide a sharper sense and realization that yes, countless ultimate sacrifices truly have been made.
Having been made, these sacrifices, individual and collective, allow for us both to celebrate, with barbeques, and to commemorate, by placing flags at veterans’ graves.
And to commemorate by sitting on the family room couch and watching movies—an activity which normally doesn’t hint at being reverential.
To that rule, TCM’s Memorial Day Weekend programming is a most welcome exception. For this, TCM once again deserves our appreciation.
