TUNE IN TONIGHT

THE THIRD MAN

TCM, 8 p.m. ET

Tonight’s featured star on TCM is Orson Welles, and you can enjoy a personal film course in superlative cinema just by staying tuned to tonight’s first three offerings in the Welles canon. First up is this moody 1949 thriller, set in postwar Vienna and starring Joseph Cotton as a man searching for the truth about the fate of a friend (Orson Welles). Welles is an actor for hire here – Carol Reed directed, with a screenplay by Graham Greene. But what a movie regardless.

CITIZEN KANE TCM, 10 p.m. ET Ranked by the American Film Institute as the best film of all time, this 1941 biography of a fictional media mogul was Welles’ thinly veiled attack on William Randolph Hearst – but watching it today, it’s easy to imagine it as a prescient broadside against Rupert Murdoch as well. The images, the acting, the subject, the structure – it’s all equally ambitious, and, even after 70 years, equally impressive.

TOUCH OF EVIL TCM, 12:15 a.m. ET This late-career triumph by Welles, made in 1958, has him directing a twisted, creepily playful murder mystery, evoking the same sorts of assurance and wit that Alfred Hitchcock would display two years later with Psycho. Welles co-stars, too, as a blowsy and corrupt cop in a thriller that also stars Charlton Heston, Dennis Weaver, and Janet Leigh – who, fittingly enough, would star in Psycho two years later.