- Paris, 4 January: Cinema professionals held a demonstration against the invasion of American films. The march was led by Simone Signoret, Jean Marais and Raymond Bussières.
- Paris, 7 January: Maurice Cloche's Monsieur Vincent has been chosen as the well-deserved winner for the major French cinema award. The script was written by Jean Anouilh, and part of the finance came from public subscription. The film paints an admirable portrait of court life during the reign of Louis XIII. Pierre Fresnay, who gives a brilliant performance as St. Vincent, brings a depth and extraordinary presence to the role.
- Paris, 13 January: Henry Verdoux, an employee of a Parisian bank, has brought an action against the producers of the film Monsieur Verdoux.
- Paris, 16 January: Marcel Pagnol has joined the ranks of France's most illustrious men of science and letters today. His entry into the hallowed sphere of the French Academy as both writer and director of such marvelous films as César and The Baker's Wife makes him the first member to come from the world of cinema.
- Los Angeles, 20 January: Release of The Naked City, directed by Jules Dassin. A new film noir melodrama from the director of Brute Force. Barry Fitzgerald stars.
- London, 22 January: Release of Anna Karenina, a British-made version of Tolstoy's novel, directed by Julien Duvivier, with Vivien Leigh, Ralph Richardson and Kieron Moore.
- Hollywood, 23 January:
 Writer-director John Huston has woven a powerful parable of greed around The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, adapted from the novel by the mysterious writer B. Traven. Shot on location in Mexico, the film follows a trio of drifters prospecting for gold: whiskery old-timer Walter Huston; baby-faced Tim Holt, more familiar as a star of B-Westerns; and Humphrey Bogart's own three-time loser, Fred C. Dobbs. They strike it rich but not lucky, and Bogart pays with his life.
Jack L. Warner hated the film and insisted that star Bogart survive the final reel, but Huston held firm and killed him off.
- London, 8 February: Viviane Romance is making her first film in England, The Woman Hater, with director Terence Young.
- Washington, DC, 8 March: Under the terms of an agreement with the United Kingdom, American film companies are undertaking to reinvest the $60 million profit made in England. The English in return will reduce the 1947 tax on American films by 75 percent.
 - Moscow, 11 February: The great Russian film director Sergei M. Eisenstein has succumbed to a heart attack at the age of 50. His lonely death, on a winter's night, brings his tragic destiny to a close. The son of an affluent architect, Eisenstein trained as an engineer in Petrograd and joined the Red Army with the fall of the Czar. In the following years, he joined up with a theater company in Moscow as a set designer, then director. It was there that he began to expand on Meyerhold's theory of "bio-mechanics" and to develop his own theories on montage and the cumulative effect of images. Subsequent to his memorable debut films -- Strike and The Battleship Potemkin (both 1925) -- problems began to accumulate, and his trip to the US and Mexico turned into a nightmare. In the Soviet Union his qualities as a director were recognized, but he was reproached for not toeing the Party line. He had to suffer the humiliations of self-criticism demanded by mere functionaries of the State. What a waste of energy and intelligence! Another bitter pill he had to swallow was the destruction of a number of reels he shot for the final part of Ivan the Terrible. Despite all this, Sergei Eisenstein -- who once praised Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the single greatest film ever made -- has left us with some towering masterpieces of the cinema: Potemkin, October, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible.
- Los Angeles, 15 March: A telegram sent to the residence of Ingrid Bergman and her husband Dr. Peter Lindstrom read: "It is with great emotion that I received your letter. By luck it arrived on my birthday, and it is the most beautiful of my presents. Believe me, I dream of shooting a film with you, and I shall do everything in my power to make it come about." It was signed Roberto Rossellini. Bergman had written to the Italian director a few days earlier, expressing her admiration for his films and to suggest they work together. In the lengthy reply that followed, Rossellini sketched the outlines of a scenario, ending the letter thus: "Will it be possible for you to come to Europe? May I invite you to Italy where we can chat about the project in a leisurely way? Yours enthusiastically, Roberto Rossellini." It seems likely that Bergman will soon be packing her bags.
- Hollywood, 20 March:
 It was no surprise that Gentleman's Agreement, nominated for six Oscars®, should have won the Best Picture and Best Director (Elia Kazan). Celeste Holm was named Best Supporting Actress for her role as the chic but lonely fashion writer in the same film. Among the cast, Gregory Peck lost to Ronald Colman (A Double Life, a) and Dorothy McGuire to Loretta Young (The Farmer's Daughter). In his fourth feature, Kazan sensitively tackled to thorny subject of anti-Semitism in the US, making the film one of the first important American social message films of the postwar period.
- Paris, 24 March: Roger Leenhardt's first film Les Dernières vacances (The Last Vacation) is a gentle evocation of the awakening love between two 16-year-old cousins who are spending their last holiday on the family property in the Languedoc. Young Odile Versois is outstanding in the role of Juliette.
- Mexico, 25 March: Ismael Rodriguez' latest project Nostrotros los pobres is a typical "rancheros" melodrama and has met with the usual enthusiasm.
- Mexico, 27 March: The release of John Ford's first Mexican film, The Fugitive, is causing controversy here. The movie, based on Graham Greene's famous novel The Power and the Glory, brings back unwelcome memories of Mexico's darker hours under the anti-clerical rule of Francisco Madero. Henry Fonda co-stars with Mexicans Dolores Del Rio and Pedro Amendáriz, and the filmmaker himself co-produced with Merian C. Cooper at RKO.
- Sofia, 5 April: The production, distribution and importation of films have become Romanian state monopolies.
- New York, 8 April:
 The return of Orson Welles as director has not passed unnoticed. The Lady from Shanghai is in the best tradition of the thriller genre, as well as being a star vehicle for Welles' wife Rita Hayworth. Having cut and bleached her famous auburn locks for the role, Hayworth plays a mysterious femme fatale who draws Welles, portraying a tough innocent Irishman, deeper into the web she weaves. The tour-de-force climax is a shootout between Hayworth and her crippled power-hungry husband Everett Sloane in a hall of mirrors at Luna Park, hitting images of each other before finding the flesh. "It's true, I made a lot of mistakes," she says in her dying breath.
- Hollywood, 26 April: Lana Turner, MGM's resident voluptuous blonde, has married Henry J. Topping, known as Bob.
- Washington, DC, 19 April: Scriptwriter John Howard Lawson has been convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to give evidence in front of the HUAC.
- Hollywood, 15 May: Cyd Charisse, alias "Hollywood's most beautiful legs," has married the crooner Tony Martin after divorcing Nico Charisse, her first husband and dancing instructor, who married her when she was only 15 years old.
 - Hollywood, 15 May: Howard Hughes, the eccentric Texas multimillionaire, airplane designer, aviator and business enterpreneur, who has occasionally ventured into film production in the past, has completed his purchase of the RKO Radio company, including its Hollywood studio and its chain of 124 theaters. This troubled company has had a long history of management reshuffling and financial problems since its formation in 1929, and although it has many memorable films to its credit, from King Kong to Citizen Kane, it has enjoyed few box-office hits. Having benefited from the wartime boom, profits declined steadily from their peak in 1946 when current studio boss Floyd Odlum decided to quit. As owner of TWA and the Hughes Tool Co., the new owner was easily able to agree to the purchase price of $8.8 million. But given the past history of his dabblings in movies, most recently with Mad Wednesday and Vendetta, the outlook for RKO is bleak.
- Washington, DC, 15 May: The Supreme Court has handed down a decision in favor of the Justice Department. The five major studios have been declared guilty of "conspiracy and discrimination" in order to secure a monopoly of the cinema circuits.
- Rome, 30 May:
 For Germany, Year Zero, Roberto Rossellini took his cameras into the devastation of postwar Berlin, in order to give the film the autheticity of a documentary. Against this grim background, he unfolds the tale of a 12-year-old boy, trying to feed his family, who kills his sickly father to lessen the burden. Unable to live with the deed, he throws himself off a ruined building. The director's compassion shines through the tragic story, which becomes symbolic of the country as a whole. The final section when the child finds a moment to play before dying shows Rossellini at his poignant best.
- Los Angeles, 16 July: Bogart and Bacall are once more in the limelight in the latest John Huston film, Key Largo, with Claire Trevor, Edward G. Robinson and Lionel Barrymore.
 - New York, 30 July: After two years of retirement, Fred Astaire was called back by MGM to co-star with Judy Garland in Easter Parade when Gene Kelly broke his ankle. They make a swell couple, especially in the duet, "A Couple of Swells," dressed as hobos.
- Los Angeles, 1 August: Paramount releases Beyond Glory, directed by John Farrow, with Alan Ladd, Donna Reed, George Macready, George Coulouris and Henry Travers.
- Los Angeles, 5 August: In MGM's A Southern Yankee, Aubrey Filmore (Red Skelton) is a bumbling bellboy in a Missouri town who pesters the Union officers there; he desperately wants to be a spy for the North in the Civil War. When Filmore accidentally waylays an infamous Confederate spy known as "The Grey Spider" and is mistaken for him by the Rebels, the Union brass see it as an opportunity for real espionage - and though Filmore is a coward as well as a fool, his real motivation for derring-do is a sweet Southern girl named Sallyann (Arlene Dahl), whom he will see again behind Southern lines. Edward Sedgwick directs Skelton's brilliant performance in this picture, which also features Brian Donlevy, George Coulouris and John Ireland.
- New York, 6 August:
 Fred Zinnemann, filming on location in the ruins of war-torn Germany, has come up with a remarkable film in semi-documentary style. The Search is that of a child, on the run from a displaced persons camp, for his mother. He is cared for and helped by an American GI, played by newcomer Montgomery Clift. The truth and simplicity of the piece cannot fail to bring tears, and a new awareness in the US of the plight of Europe's war orphans. Clift is surely destined for stardom, while Ivan Jandl, a nine-year-old Czech boy who lived under the Nazi occupation of Prague, is a natural.
- Hollywood, 8 August: Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire will be together again on the screen for the first time in nine years in The Barkleys of Broadway, directed by Charles Walters.
 - New York, 20 August: Howard Hawks has reworked the Mutiny on the Bounty into a masterly Western, Red River, with martinet trail boss John Wayne driving a huge herd of cattle from Texas to the railhead at Abilene. On the way, his adopted son, Montgomery Clift, in his first film role, rebels against his tyrannical behavior. Originally estimated at $1.7 million, in his quest for perfection, Hawks went an astronomical $1 million over budget and production stalled while Hawks refinanced the project. But the result is sure to be a multi-million dollar million hit. Another newcomer to make an impact in Red River is John Ireland, cast as a young gunslinger who tangles fatally with Wayne at the end of the movie. During filming, the handsome Ireland fell in love with the leading lady, Joanne Dru, and they will be married next year.
- Hollywood, 26 August:
 Alfred Hitchcock's new film, Rope, represents yet another departure for the "master of suspense." It is the first picture for his own new production company, Transatlantic Pictures, in partnership with British producer Sidney Bernstein. Based on the successful play by British author Patrick Hamilton, it concerns two young men who murder for kicks. They conceal the corpse in a large chest in the living room of their apartment, where they entertain the victim's father and friends, and play a game of cat and mouse with their former teacher (a fine performance from James Stewart). It is grippingly filmed in long takes, averaging seven to eight minutes each, preserving the unity of time and space.
 - Venice, 5 September: Laurence Olivier's Hamlet has carried away the prize for best film at the Venice Film Festival. Jean Simmons, his shimmeringly beautiful Ophelia, was voted best actress, and the film's lighting cameraman Desmond Dickinson won for best cinematography.Hamlet is a technical tour de force in black and white, in which Dickinson's camera roams obsessively through Roger Furse's sets and the battlements of Elsinore, capturing the players in stunning deep focus. Olivier's blond Hamlet is a sleepwalker with an Œdipus complex, and comic relief is provided by Stanley Holloway's wry performance as the gravedigger. A remarkable exercise in English expressionism, Hamlet is an intriguing marriage of film and theatre.
- London, 6 September:
 Director Michael Powell's progress toward the musical choreographing of a film has produced The Red Shoes, a fantasy set in the world of ballet. The shoes are those of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, transformed into a ballet danced by redheaded ballerina Moira Shearer. She is possessed by their spell and dances to her death. Drenched in color and saturated with surging emotions moving in time with the wordless soundtrack, The Red Shoes ran way over budget but looks to be a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
- France, 15 September: Marcel Pagnol is in the Alpes-Maritime where he has just finished shooting La Belle Meunière, played by his wife Jacqueline and Tino Rossi. The film -- made in Rouxcolor (named after the Roux brothers, its inventors) -- is the second French color film.
- Los Angeles, 30 September: Robert Mitchum has been freed from prison. He was sentenced to 21 days for the possession and use of marijuana, despite having paid a $1000 bond.
- Los Angeles, 1 October: Release of Howard Hawks' Red River with John Wayne, Montgomery Clift and Joanne Dru.
- Paris, 26 October: Inauguration by Henri Langlois of the first cinema museum in avenue de Messine.
- Hollywood, 30 October: Release of the fifth American adaptation of the Alexander Dumas novel The Three Musketeers, a highly inventive version made by George Sidney with dancer Gene Kelly as D'Artagnan.
- Rome, 2 November: Release of Roberto Rossellini's new effort L'Amore (Women aka Ways of Love), a film in two parts: the first taken from The Human Voice by Jean Cocteau, and the second, The Miracle, based on an idea by Federico Fellini, who also plays the male lead with Anna Magnani.
- Los Angeles, 4 November:
 Olivia De Havilland gives a superbly judged performance in Fox's The Snake Pit. She portrays an intellegent woman hovering on the edge of mental disintegration in on overcrowded state mental asylum. Leo Genn and Mark Stevens proved somewhat stolid support as, respectively, a gently romantic psychiatrist and a bewildered but loyal husband, while Betsy Blair, Isabel Jewell, Jan Clayton and Beulah Bondi act up a storm as De Havilland's fellow patients. Based on an autobiographical novel by Mary Jane Ward, and directed by Anatole Litvak, The Snake Pit paints a harrowing picture of mental breakdown and the slow and painful process of recovery.
- Los Angeles, 9 November: RKO releases Robert Wise's Blood on the Moon, a Western starring Robert Mitchum and Barbara Bel Geddes, with Robert Preston, Walter Brennan, Phyllis Thaxter and Frank Faylen.
- New York, 11 November: Premiere of Victor Fleming's Joan of Arc from RKO, starring Ingrid Bergman, with Francis L. Sullivan, J. Carrol Naish, Ward Bond, Gene Lockhart, Leif Erickson, Cecil Kellaway and José Ferrer.
 - Rome, 26 November: Italy is now living through extremely difficult times, with many of the country's population deprived of jobs, food and money. Vittorio De Sica's most recent film, The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di Biciclette), poignantly and powerfully reflects this turmoil through the story of Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani), a 40-year-old worker, who has been unemployed for two years. When he is offered a job as a bill-sticker, provided he has a bicycle, he retrieves his own from the pawnbroker by having his wife pawn their only pair of sheets. However, on the first day of work the bicycle is stolen, and he spends a long day with his small son searching for it. His only comfort comes from the little boy (Enzo Staiola), who holds his hand tenderly. Finally, out of desperation, Antonio decides to steal a bicycle for himself. After De Sica's success in the US with Shoeshine (1946), David O. Selznick offered to produce his next film, suggesting Cary Grant for the lead. De Sica refused, raised the money himself, and continued his policy of shooting in real locations with non-actors. This principle has paid off, because the very un-Hollywood quality of the film -- the simplicity and underlying social criticism -- is what will give it a wide international appeal.
- Los Angeles, 30 November: Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles have filed for divorce.
- Los Angeles, 30 November: Release of The Boy With Green Hair, a fable about conformity and the right to be different, directed by Joseph Losey, with Dean Stockwell in the title role.
- New York, 31 December: Louise Brooks, who retired from the cinema in 1938 after her flagging career failed to revive, is now working as a $40-a-week salesgirl at Saks Fifth Avenue.
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22 January - London, England,