TCM Star of the Month October 2016: Christopher Lee

Surprisingly, The Wicker Man is not on the TCM schedule this month

We're in the first full week of a new month, and as I mentioned yesterday, with it being October there's a lot of opportunity to see horror movies. And so it makes some sense that TCM selected Christopher Lee as the star of the month, since he's so identified with those Hammer horror movies. But he did a fair amount of non-horror work, and TCM will be sampling that as well.

Tonight at 8:00 PM, for example, TCM will be showing the rarely-seen Jinnah, in what is apparently the North American television premiere. Christopher Lee stars as Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a name people in America might not recognize. Everybody knows Gandhi, but when Indians were struggling for their independence from Britain, Jinnah believed that the Muslim minority needed a nation of its own. He eventually got his wish as India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, which at the time consisted of West Pakistan (the country today known as Pakistan) and East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh, having seceded from the West in a bloody civil war. Of course, partition mean huge population migrations, which is probably why Jinnah is such a controversial figure. It's one I'm really looking forward to.