- London, 1 January: Release of Basil Reardon's The Blue Lamp, starring Dirk Bogarde and Jack Warner.
- Moscow, 21 January: Mosfilm studios present Mikhail Chiaureli's two-part super production Padeniye Berlina (Berlin Falls).
- Paris, 25 January:
 Married since 1944, Simone Signoret and the director Yves Allégret have made four films together, the latest being Manèges (Wanton), released today. Like their preceding film, Dédé d'Anvers, this is a dark realist drama, written by Jacques Sigurd. Signoret plays a convincing bitch, who shamelessly deceives her pathetic middle-aged husband (well portrayed by Bernard Blier), and bleeds him dry with the help of her greedy mother. This moody story is narrated in flashbacks, which are quite cleverly utilized to reveal the truth, after we initially see the wife through the eyes of the husband.
 - Los Angeles, 3 February: Having tackled anti-Semitism in 1948, Hollywood turned the spotlight on the color question in 1949 in Fox's Pinky, directed by Elia Kazan, in which Jeanne Crain played a light-skinned colored girl passing for white and romancing William Lundigan. The casting of a white star in a colored role -- thus avoiding a shock to audiences with a black-white kiss -- underlined the compromises which the studio felt it had to make. Now MGM's Intruder in the Dust, adapted from the William Faulkner novel, confronts the problem of race relations. Directed by Clarence Brown with an intensity uncharacteristic of the studio's glossy image, the film tells the story of an elderly Southern black man, played with great dignity by Juano Hernandez, falsely accused of murder and then threatened with lynch law. His disdain for his bigoted accusers is so intense that he declines to defend himslef, and it falls to a group of liberal-minded whites to save him.
- Stockholm, 20 February: Premiere of Ingmar Bergman's Till Gladje (To Joy) with Maj-Britt Nilsson, Stig Olin, Victor Sjöström and, in a minor role, Erland Josephson.
- Cannes, 25 February: A decision reached at the Film Producer's Conference will change the Cannes Film Festival to take place in the spring from now on, rather than in September; consequently, there will be no festival this year.
- Paris, 25 February:
 Having been on bad terms from the time Jean Gabin refused to appear in Marcel Carné's Les Portes de la nuit (Gates of the Night) in 1946, the actor and director have finally reconciled. Gabin and Carné have just worked together again on La Marie du port, which is an atmospheric drama based on Georges Simonon's novel. Gabin plays Henri Chatelard, a man well into his forties, who owns a restaurant and a movie theater in the city. Henri appreciates women. But when he meets Marie (Nicole Courcel), a 18-ish stronghead who has just lost her father in a small fishing village, it is not clear who is the hunter and who is the prey.
- Madrid, 8 March: Generalissimo Francisco Franco's government has announced the creation of the National Office of Entertainment Classification to give a morality rating (on a scale of one to six) to all films.
 - Hollywood, 10 March: Pretty and petite Jane Powell, the natural successor to actress Deanna Durbin, appears in the title role of MGM's new musical Nancy Goes to Rio, which is, in fact, a remake of the 1940 Durbin vehicle, It's a Date. The story of a mother (Ann Sothern) and teenage daughter (Powell), both coveting the same parts in a play and the same man (Barry Sullivan), is wafer thin, even though it is stuffed with musical goodies. In the film, Powell sings "Time and Time Again" as well as "Musetta's Waltz" from La Bohème. Naturally, given Nancy's destination, it comes as no surprise to discover Carmen Miranda -- "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat!" from 1943's The Gang's All Here -- turning up to provide a few laughs and then sing a characteristic number called "Cha Bomm Pa Pa." Unfortunately, the "Brazilian Bombshell" has been seen very little lately. She enlivened many a 20th Century-Fox musical in the early 1940s, at the time when this eccentric, exotic entertainer was one of the highest paid in America.
- Hollywood, 23 March:
 The most successful movie at this year's Academy Awards ceremony was Robert Rossen's All the King's Men. It has been voted Best Picture and also won the Best Actor award for Broderick Crawford's blistering performance as the corrupt Southern politician Willie Stark. For the same film, Crawford's co-star Mercedes McCambridge, a distinguished stage actress making her film debut, took the Best Supporting Actress Oscar®. The Academy voted Olivia De Havilland the Best Actress for the second time, a just reward for her portrayal of the gauche spinster Catherine Sloper in The Heiress. Joseph L. Mankiewicz received both the Best Director and Best Screenplay nods this year for his elegant but barbed satire, A Letter to Three Wives. The Best Supporting Actor prize went to Dean Jagger for his work in the war drama Twelve O'Clock High. Special Awards were made to Fred Astaire, Cecil B. De Mille and child star Bobby Driscoll.
 - Paris, 29 March: A teenage brother and sister share a claustrophobic, self-obsessed world in a single cluttered room, and the intrusion of others leads to tragedy. These are the ingredients of Les Enfants terribles from Jean Cocteau's bizarre 1920s novel, brilliantly shot by Jean-Pierre Melville almost entirely on the Théâtre Pigalle stage. But this interpretation of Cocteau by Melville suffers from what one critic calls "creative schizophrenia;" i.e., the work of two highly individual artists that doesn't do justice to either of them. As the brother and sister, Edouard Dermithe -- a classic Cocteau hero whom Cocteau had rescued from the mines of Northern France and who was Cocteau's lover at the time -- and Nicole Stéphane -- the classic Melville heroine, with her Left Bank angst and butch vitality -- scarcely seem to belong on the same planet, let alone in the same movie. Perhaps it would have been better if Cocteau had directed this film himself. One great auteur should be enough for any picture.
- Rome, 31 March:
 The release of Roberto Rossellini's latest film, Stromboli, is set to cause a stir. Ingrid Bergman stars alongside Mario Vitale as a Lithuanian woman who marries a young Italian fisherman to escape from an internment camp. However, she finds only loneliness and hostility on his barren island home. At the climax of the film, the pregnant Bergman flees in terror from the island's erupting volcano. Bergman's fans have been taken aback at seeing her stripped of the trappings of Hollywood stardom, and puritan groups in the United States are already up in arms about stories that Bergman has left her husband to live with Rossellini in Rome.
- Washington, DC, 10 April: The Supreme Court is refusing to comment on the condemnation of screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and John Lawson for their contempt of Congress. This effectively upholds the condemnation. It also affects the eight other hostile witness of the "Hollywood Ten."
- Los Angeles, 12 April: After making its reputation in Cannes, the British director Carol Reed's The Third Man is now seeing release in the US. Here, too, Anton Karas' haunting zither music will no doubt captivate the public.
- Buenos Aires, 13 April: The powerful influence of certain European films and a strong literary sensibility are discernible in Leopoldo Torre Nilsson's first feature film, El Crimen de Oribe (Oribe's Crime), which starts screening today.
- Hollywood, 20 April: Alfred Hitchcock has bought the rights to Patricia Highsmith's first novel Strangers on a Train.
- Peking, 30 April: Effective immediately, the Central Office of Cinematographic Control is now attached to the Ministry of Culture. Mao Tse-Tung's wife Jian Quing, who was herself an actress in pre-war Shanghai, is a member of a committee set up to advise and control the film industry.
- Rome, May 24: From the time the American public learned that Ingrid Bergman, wife and mother, had become the mistress of the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, groups of moralists have raged against her. In making a reference to Stromboli, Bergman's first movie in Italy, Senator Edwin C. Johnson declared: "The degenerate Rossellini has deceived the American people with an idiotic story of a volcano and a pregnant woman. We must protect ourselves against such scourges." Bergman has not tried to justify herself, but stated, "Americans do not understand that a mother might be blinded by passion to the point of sacrificing her daughter." Her divorce from her husband Dr. Peter Lindstrom having been finalized in Los Angeles on 1 November, the star is now able to marry Rossellini at last.
- Hollywood, 8 June:
 Hollywood is always full of young blonde hopefuls with luscious bodies but little discernable talent. One such was former model Marilyn Monroe, who made little impact in the movies until she allowed herself to be ogled by Groucho Marx in last year's film Love Happy. Then she got an agent, Johnny Hyde, who had her jaw remodeled and nose bob-tipped. He saw that Monroe had that special "something extra," and his lobbying of producers has secured her a small but significant part in the gripping thriller by John Huston, The Asphalt Jungle, as the mistress of crooked legal big-shot Louis Calhern. But Monroe has only to sprawl languorously across the sofa in their lovenest to charge the screen with crackling sexual static. Born Norma Jean Baker in Los Angeles in 1926, she had an unhappy childhood followed by marriage to her first husband at age 16 simply to forestall a spell in the county orphanage. After the war she drifted into model work and then films, making her screen debut with a small part in the 1947 film The Dangerous Years, a B-picture about juvenile delinquents. Now, after two years of struggling to make a break-through, it looks as if Norma Jean's ship is about to come in.
 - London, 10 June: Forced out of Hollywood last year by the anti-Red witch hunt, Jules Dassin has come to England, where he has made Night and the City. The plot plunges us into a London milieu of seedy nightclubs, sharks, killers, con artists and tarts -- a background Dassin uses as effectively as he had used New York in The Naked City two years ago. Americans Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney lead a virtually all-English cast: he a hustler, whose greatest ambition is to promote wrestling matches, she a singer at the Silver Fox nightclub. Crooked deals and double-crosses have Widmark running from gangsters. Tautly directed and strong on atmosphere, the film proves that exile has not diluted Dassin's talent.
- Paris, 17 June:
 After his eight-year sojourn in Hollywood, Max Ophüls has marked his return to France with a flourish. His La Ronde, adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's scandalous play, consists of 10 episodes, linked by a master-of-ceremonies narrator, in which the protagonists ride a sexual merry-go-round in 19th-century Vienna. The circular structure reveals one partner in one story always connecting with one in the next, such as the whore and the soldier, the soldier and the maid, the maid and the master, and so forth. To tell this tale of sexual mores and the illusion of love, Ophüls has assembled a glittering cast: Simone Signoret (whore), Serge Reggiani (soldier), Simone Simon (maid), Daniel Gélin (young man), Danielle Darrieux (married lady), Fernand Gravey (husband), Odette Joyeux (grisette), Gérard Philipe (lieutenant), Isa Miranda (actress) and Jean-Louis Barrault (poet). The picture opens with narrator Anton Walbrook giving a splendedly elegant performance, walking through a film studio onto a fin-de-siècle set, putting on an opera cloak and commenting on the action, providing a distancing effect. Fitting style to subject, Ophüls utilizes a mobile camera that itself acts as a kind of carousel, and with Oscar Straus' seductive waltz theme, La Ronde is a witty confection, lighter than the more mordant Schnitzler original.
- Los Angeles, 20 June: Singer Judy Garland, who has been suffering from deep depression, has attempted suicide by cutting her throat with a piece of glass. Her family raced to her aid, and she is reported to be out of danger.
- Los Angeles, 20 July:
 The first Western from director Delmer Daves, Broken Arrow, tells the story of US Army scout Jefford (James Stewart), who marries a young Apache girl (Debra Paget), becomes the friend of Cochise (Jeff Chandler) and convinces him to sign a peace treaty with the whites. But Geronimo and a number of arms dealers refuse to accept the peace. Then when white renegades murder his wife, Jefford rebels against those of his race. Broken Arrow can be considered as the first great pro-American Indian film. Based on verifiable fact, it faithfully evokes the relationship between Cochise and Jefford, marking a historic rehabilitation of Indians in the cinema. It is also one of the first Hollywood films to show a mixed race marriage. "It is said that Broken Arrow is the first adult Western talkie. We have tried to present the Apaches as human beings and not as savages," said director Daves. "At the beginning, James Stewart's voice indicates what is in the offing. He says, 'The Indians, when they speak, will speak American, so that you'll be able to understand them.' Therein lies the main theme of the film, the necessity to understand our neighbors irrespective of race or skin color, to reach the only possible rational means of living, to lead a peaceful life." A fine message of tolerance, which the quality of the film justifies. Daves gained sympathy for the American Indians from living among the Navaho and Hopi tribes in his youth. It is hoped that the director will continue on the same path to peace.
- Hollywood, 30 July: Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin have decided to sell 3,600 of their 4,000 shares in United Artists.
- Prague, 4 August: Director Jiri Weiss has released his new film Posledni vystrel (The Last Shot), filmed with a cast of non-professional actors.
- Paris, 7 August:
 Martine Carol's failed suicide attempt on 10 April 1947 seems to have given her a new lease on life, although a faction of the press continues to criticize the young actress. Nevertheless, she looks radiant and acts seductively in her latest film, Caroline, chérie, which just opened in Paris. Exuding happiness, Carol appeared on the arm of her husband Steve Crane, the ex-husband of Lana Turner, at the premiere held at the Marivaux cinema. They have been married for some months, and her private life, like her career, looks like it has improved. Caroline, chérie is a large-scale costume production, based on the 1949 best-selling historical novel by Cecil Saint-Laurent, with a scenario by the playwright Jean Anouilh. It is directed by Richard Pottier, who had given Carol her first genuine role in La Ferme aux loups in 1944. Carole plays Caroline de Bièvres, a 16-year-old girl who attains womanhood in the arms of young Count Gaston de Sallanches (Jacques Dacqmine), before the two are separated by the upheavals of the French Revolution. Caroline is plunged into a series of romantic and dangerous adventures, even getting married out of spite, while searching for her lover through a France in turmoil. Naturally, they are reunited at the happy ending. We are left with little doubt that this film will rocket the voluptuous blonde Martine Carol to stardom at last.
 - New York, 10 August: In Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, the old Hollywood, in the form of Gloria Swanson's forgotten silent star Norma Desmond, comes into uncomprehending and fatal contact with the new Hollywood, represented by William Holden's washed-up screenwriter Joe Gillis. Rummaging in the dim recesses of his memory, Holden recalls that Gloria used to be big in pictures. She hisses back, "I am big. It's the pictures that got small!" Wilder's savage satire on Tinseltown comes at a time when Hollywood's horizons are shrinking, its nerve failing and its very future seems in question. Swanson is the ghost at this feast, in her umpteenth comeback as a mad silent movie queen haunting a decaying mansion where thousands of images of herself gather the dust of ages, and the "waxworks" of Hollywood history -- Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner and Anna Q. Nilsson -- gather to play interminable hands of bridge. Norma also dreams of a comeback, with her crazy script edited by gigolo Holden, and Wilder fills the picture with references to Swanson's own past in the high summer of the silents: Norma, talons clawing the air, caught in the flickering light cast by Queen Kelly, whose director Erich von Stroheim is cast in Sunset Boulevard as her former husband and director now turned sepulchral butler; Norma's visit to Swanson's old stamping ground, Paramount Studios, where the real Cecil B. De Mille is directing Samson and Delilah and calls her "young fellow," just as he did in 1919 when they were making Male and Female; and Swanson's repeat of the marvelous Chaplin imitation from the 1924 Manhandled. The story goes that Mae West, Pola Negri and Mary Pickford turned down the faded star part before Swanson, who has lost none of her native shrewdness, seized it with both hands and made it her own.
- Tokyo, 25 August: Release of Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon, an intriguing work with forceful performances from Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura.
- Paris, 26 August: With producer Georges Grandière failing to honor his commitments, and the backing of the film not yet assured, Abel Gance has canceled his contract for his film on the life of Christ, The Divine Tragedy. The film will not be made.
- 1 September, Tokyo: American occupational authorities have instituted a purge among the Japanese cinema circles where numerous key figures were, and are still, very involved with militarist and ultra-nationalist movements.
- Venice, 10 September: This year's awards have been given to films addressing social problems. Best Italian film goes to Leonide Moguy's work Domani è troppo tardi (Tomorrow Is Too Late), and André Cayatte's handling of a euthanasia case in Justice est faite takes off with the Golden Lion award. Eleanor Parker receives the best actress nod for her role as the moving victim in John Cromwell's pessimistic film Caged, and Sam Jaffe is named best actor for The Asphalt Jungle.
- New York, 14 September: During a reception in his honor, Joseph L. Mankiewicz violently denounced the current blacklisting as well as Cecil B. DeMille's demand that members of the Screen Directors' Guild swear an oath of loyalty.
- Paris, 29 September: Jean Cocteau has made a screen version of his play Orphée, entitled Le Testement de Orphée. Jean Marais and Marie Déa portray Orpheus and Eurydice. It is the second film in Cocteau's Orphic trilogy, the first being The Blood of the Poet.
- Hollywood, 22 October:
 Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's latest for Fox is All About Eve. The woman of the title is Anne Baxter's scheming young would-be actress who inveigles her way into the entourage of veteran Broadway star Bette Davis to launch her own career. Davis is superb in the role of Margo Channing, the aging actress ruthlessly undermined by her own protégée, as cozy as a curdled cocktail, clutching an ever-present cigarette in her talons and dispensing measured venom in all directions with her corncrake voice. The man who really knows "all about Eve" is waspish theater critic Addison de Witt, played with suave caddishness by George Sanders, and it is his voice-over that provides the elegantly barbed commentary to this saga of back-stabbing among theater folk. At one point Sanders appears with rising star Marilyn Monroe on his arm and languidly introduces her as "a graduate of the Copacabana school of acting." Though faced with strong opposition from a cast that's on top of its collective form, Sanders steals the film. According to Mankiewicz, the film is based on a similar incident in the lives of Elisabeth Bergner and Paul Czinner after they took an equally ambitious young actress under their wing.
- Monaco, 31 October: Accused of "libidinous relations" with a 17-year-old girl, actor Errol Flynn has just been acquitted by the Monaco court.
- Rio de Janiero, 1 November: The Vera Cruz company, created and run by director Alterto Cavalcanti, who has recently returned from Europe, has released its first film, Adolfo Celi's Calçara.
 - Mexico, 19 November: The release here of Luis Buñuel's latest project, Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned), has provoked violent reactions. The press and conservative politicians have demanded it be banned because "it constitutes an insult to the Mexican nation." Various unions and associations have asked that the Spanish emigré director be expelled from the country forthwith. The film has obviously touched a raw nerve. Shot in only 21 days in the slums of the capital, it exposes the terrible life that faces the youth, forgotten by Mexican society and often driven to delinquency. The harsh realism of many of the incidents, notably the beating up of a blind musician, is mixed with Buñuel's surrealism in the powerful dream sequences.
- Hollywood, 21 November: RKO has yielded to injunctions from the Justice Department regarding the integration of its activities. The organization will split into two distinct companies: RKO Pictures Corporation, which takes over film production, and RKO Theaters Corporation to manage the moviehouses.
- Mexico, 23 November: Luis Buñuel's The Young and the Damned has to close after only four days. It has been widely attacked and has failed to attract the public.
- Rome, 25 November:
 With Cronaca di un Amore (Chronicle of a Love), Michelangelo Antonioni has at last taken his place among Italian feature-length film directors. Born in Ferrara in 1912, he studied at the University of Bologna, where he spent his time between business and economics studies indulging in music, art and tennis. After experimenting with 16mm films and writing film critiques for a local paper, he came to Rome in 1939 where he became an influential critic on the magazine Cinema. After the war ended, he collaborated on screenplays for Giuseppe De Santis and Roberto Rossellini. He then directed six short documentaries before making his first feature at age 38. Cronaca di un Amore tells of an adulterous wife (Lucia Bosé) and her impoverished lover (Massimo Girotti) plotting to murder her rich husband, but when he dies under mysterious circumstances, they have to live with the guilt of their intention. The director's elegant style, using long takes while remorselessly pursuing the characters, is in contrast to the neo-realist manner of many of his Italian contemporaries. The plot, however, is similar to The Postman Always Rings Twice, which inspired Luchino Visconti's first film, Ossessione, also starring Girotti.
- Milan, 15 December: Roberto Rossellini's newest work Flowers of St. Francis, portrayed by Aldo Fabrizi, is an honest portrayal of the saint's spiritual quest.
 - New York, 26 December: Judy Holliday is the ultimate "dumb broad" Billie Dawn in the film version of Born Yesterday, a part she played on Broadway four years ago. Ordered by her ox-like sugar daddy Broderick Crawford to pick up a little bit of culture from college-boy reporter William Holden, she finally floors brutish Brod with the immortal invocation, delivered in a piercing Bronx whine, to "Drop dead!" Holliday is an actress of great intelligence, exuberance and precision, and an accomplished stealer of pictures, as she proved last year when playing the bird-brained attempted-murder suspect in Adam's Rib. Incredibly, she was only Columbia's fifth choice for Born Yesterday, after Rita Hayworth, Jan Sterling, Gloria Grahame and Evelyn Keyes.
- Washington, DC, 31 December: According to the latest census there are approximately 71,500 movie theaters in the world, a figure that includes America's 11,300 movies houses and 4,700 drive-ins.
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25 February - Sligo, Ireland,