- Chicago, 2 January: Yesterday marked a television milestone with the first public text of phonevision, or pay-per-view TV, being carried out among 300 families representing a cross section of the public. They are being offered three movies a day for $1 per film. Curtains went up at 4 p.m. with April Showers, a musical starring Jack Carson and Ann Sothern.
- Prague, 26 January: Opening of Jiri Trnka's animated feature film Bajaja (The Princess Bayaya). Trnka drew his inspiration from an old folk tale.
- Paris, 7 February:
 Six years after Les Dames du bois du Boulogne, Robert Bresson is at last presenting audiences with his new movie, Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest). Based on the 1936 novel of the same title by Georges Bernanos, the film recounts, through the pages of a diary, the daily life of a young priest (Claude Laydu), assailed by self-doubt and unable to resolve the problems of his small parish at Ambricourt in the province of the Pas-de-Calais. He ultimately dies alone, painfully of stomach caner, murmuring "All is Grace." Bresson, who wrote the scrupulously faithful scenario himself, has pushed the austere style of his previous two films to the limit. In fact, not since the films of Carl Dreyer has there been such an uncompromising eye. Bresson's use of non-actors, natural sound, pared-down images and real locations has disconcerted a number of critics. Among them, Ado Kyrou has been the most virulent, fulminating against what he sees as "anti-cinema." Bernanos' spiritual tale seemed an unlikely subject for a motion picture, but Bresson has managed to convey the solitude and inner anguish of the characters by their external behavior and by shots of them in isolation, while using the literary device of the first person narrative or interior dialogue.
- New York, 9 February: Actress Greta Garbo, a resident in the US since 1925, has become an American citizen.
- New York, 21 February: A revised edition of David Lean's acclaimed British film, Oliver Twist (1948), which had been judged "anti-Semitic," was accorded a Production Code seal of approval today by the directors of the MPAA. Eagle Lion Classics are reported to have made "extensive cuts."
- Tokyo, 1 March: Filmmaker Keisuke Kinoshita has produced the first Japanese color film (filmed in Fujicolor), Karumen kokyo ni kaeru (Carmen Comes Home), starring Hideko Takamine.
- Philadelphia, 7 March:
 Frank Sinatra, who divorced Nancy Barbato last November, has now announced that he is to marry Ava Gardner, whose latest film is Albert Lewin's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Gardner and Sinatra got to know each other in December 1949 and since then have conducted an affair interrupted by a succession of stimulating scandals. In March 1950 the besotted Sinatra fired two pistol shots out of the window of the Hotel Hampshire in an imaginative ploy to convince Gardner that he was attempting suicide. In May, he hurried to Barcelona to prise her from the arms of her lover Mario Cabre. Blows were exchanged between the rivals for Pandora's favors. In June the two lovers descended on London, where Gardner was presented to Queen Elizabeth, who had the good sense to ensure that the brawling singer was not on hand to shatter the calm of the proceedings. In spite of these episodes, and other public spats too numerous to mention, the couple set off today to be married in Mexico at the home of theatrical agent Lester Sachs.
- Washington, DC, 21 March: Larry Parks, star of smash hits The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again, has admitted to the HUAC that he was a member of the Communist Party from 1941 to 1945.
- Hollywood, 27 March: New restrictions are announced in the Production Code: any reference to venereal disease, abortion or drugs is forbidden. Additionally, suicide may not be shown in a favorable light, nor used by any character to escape the penalty of the law.
- Hollywood, 29 March:
 It was hard to say whether the art form being honored at the Oscar® ceremonies held at the RKO Pantages Theater was the cinema or the stage. The Best Picture (and the recipient of a record-breaking 14 nominations) was Joseph L. Mankiewicz's brittle comedy-drama of backstage life, All About Eve. The film managed to garner both the Best Director and Best Screenplay Oscars® (Mankiewicz, for the second year in a row), as well as Best Supporting Actor, the latter going to George Sanders as the acid-tongued theater critic Addison de Witt. But Eve's star, Bette Davis, lost out to Judy Holliday for her performance as the dumb blonde turned smart cookie in George Cukor's Born Yesterday. The film proved no less triumphant for Holliday than the play had done, which could equally apply to Josephine Hull, who was named Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of James Stewart's dotty sister in Harvey. Another film adapted from the stage was Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), for which José Ferrer obtained the Best Actor prize. The film gave a wider audience a chance to witness his dynamic tragi-comic performance as the long-nosed poet and swordsman, whom Ferrer had played on Broadway.
- Paris, 2 April: The new cinema publication Cahiers de Cinéma is now on sale. The journal, which is financed by the owner of Cinéphone distribution, Léonid Keigel, is the work of a group of young film critics from the now defunct Revue du Cinéma. Well-known writers such as André Bazin, Lo Duca, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Edward Dmytryk are among contributors to the first issue.
- Mexico, 11 April: Opening of Luis Buñuel's Susana (aka The Devil and the Flesh), with Rosita Quintana and Fernando Soler. In this film, the director pushes the conventions of melodrama to their extreme limit.
 - Cannes, 20 April: For the first time, the Cannes Film Festival has been held in spring. Therefore, it will no longer have to compete with the Mostra at Venice, which will continue to take place in the fall. The jury presented their Grand Prix jointly to Vittorio De Sica's fairy tale Miracle in Milan and to Miss Julie, Alf Sjöberg's adaptation of the August Strindberg play. The Special Jury Prize was given to Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve, while Bette Davis was compensated for not winning the Oscar® by being named best actress for the same film. England's Michael Redgrave was awarded the best actor prize for The Browning Version, and Luis Buñuel was considered the best director for his Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned).
- Washington, DC, 25 April:
 Edward Dmytryk, the only well-known director among the Hollywood Ten, most of them writers who were found guilty of contempt of Congress in 1948, has now recanted and appeared before the HUAC as a "friendly witness." Having served a 6-month prison sentence in 1950 and being effectively blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, Dmytryk has now attempted to distance himself from the other members of the Ten. In this way, he probably hopes to resume his career as a successful director. On his release from jail, he met on a regular basis with a "rehabilitation" committee that included Ronald Reagan and Roy Brewer (the latter representing the newly-formed Motion Picture Industry Council), and his current testimony at HUAC's new round of hearings here is the result. Dmytryk, a leading RKO director during the 1940s whose successful works included Farewell My Lovely (1944) and Crossfire (1947), ironically, an indictment of intolerance, went to England after the 1947 HUAC hearings and continued to work there. By the time he returned to the US for sentencing in 1950, he had already completed three movies, of which Obsession (1948) with Robert Newton is the most interesting.
- Los Angeles, 30 April: Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland, who have been married since 1945, have filed for divorce.
 - New York, 10 May: In his third film for MGM, Mario Lanza stars in The Great Caruso, a cliché-ridden biopic about one of opera's immortals with a noticeably portly Lanza warbling away in the title role. As an accurate portrait of Caruso the picture treads a fine line between complete fabrication and total invention, but it has all the makings of a huge box-office hit. Ann Blyth co-stars as Caruso's wife Dorothy Benjamin (his other wife had been written out of the script) and opera fans are treated to a parade of talent that includes not only the treacle-voiced Lanza but also Blanche Thebom, Teresa Celli and Giuseppe Valdengo. All in all, the picture represents a triumpt for the engagingly vulgar cultural pretensions of producer Joe Pasternak.
- Tokyo, 23 May: Akira Kurosawa's Hakuchi (The Idiot), based on Dostoevsky's novel and featuring Masayuki Mori and Toshiro Mifune, opens today.
- Peking, 30 June: Under personal supervision from Mao Tse Tung, the popular People's Daly is launching a violent campaign against Sun Yu's film The Life of Wu Xun, released several months ago. The Chinese film world fears this is only the beginning of a wave of ideological "purification."
- Rome, 13 July: A group of producers has set up Italian Film Export, a company that will promote Italian films in the American market, which European filmmakers are finding increasingly difficult to break into.
- New York, 20 July: Time Inc. has decided to suspend production of The March of Time. The famous weekly newsreel was begun in 1935.
- Vermont, 23 July: Distinguished documentary filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty died today. He was planning two projects for the State Department, one about the division of Germany and another about the Hawaiian Islands.
- Czechoslovakia, 29 July: First prize at the Karlovy Vary Festival went to Soviet director Yuri Raizman's Dream of a Cossack.
- Hollywood, 14 August: The most powerful newspaper tycoon in America, William Randolph Hurst, has died. He had provided Orson Welles with his inspiration for the fascinating and enigmatic character Citizen Kane.
- New York, 28 August:
 Director George Stevens' A Place in the Sun is a somewhat portentous remake of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, originally filmed in 1931 by Josef von Sternberg. Montgomery Clift is the charming but weak drifter fatally torn between underprivileged factory drab Shelley Winters and rich society beauty Elizabeth Taylor, and Stevens concentrates on the romantic aspects of the story rather than on Dreiser's anatomy of class conflict. The result is a gripping but supremely glossy tearjerker, full of swooning embraces in which Clift and Taylor melt into each other in massive close-up. Ultimately, the picture is overwhelmed by the technical polish applied by the director, but an excessively drab Winters is outstanding, and Charles Chaplin has hailed A Place in the Sun as the best movie ever to come out of Hollywood. It already looks like a real contender for the Academy Awards®.
 - Hollywood, 28 August: Troubled star Robert Walker has died from an adverse reaction to prescription drugs during the filming of Leo McCarey's My Son John. Ravaged by the alcoholism that overwhelmed him after his divorce from Barbara Ford, daughter of John Ford, Walker nonetheless turned in a remarkable performance as playboy psychopath Bruno Anthony in Alfred Hitchcock's recent Strangers on a Train. As the playboy psychopath Bruno Anthony, casually swapping murders with Farley Granger's weak-willed tennis star, Walker painted a disturbing portrait of a demonic hero light years away from the boys next door he played at the beginning of his career. Hitchcock enabled McCarey to finish My Son John by turning over out-takes from the final reel of Strangers on a Train. So we get to see Bruno Anthony die twice on screen. Walker was married to Jennifer Jones (1939-47) by whom he had two sons.
- Venice, 1 September:
 The Venice Film Festival has reaffirmed its international credentials by awarding its Golden Lion prize for the first time to a Japanese film, Rashomon, reportedly to the great amazement of its director Akira Kurosawa. His work has been coolly received in Japan but the jury at Venice was unanimous in its praise of the film's visual, narrative and erotic qualities. In Rashomon four people involved in a rape-murder give varying accounts of what happened. Its success will open up new markets for Japanese cinema.
- Tokyo, 14 September: Opening of Kenji Mizoguchi's film Woman of Musashino with Kinuyo Tanaka and Masayuki Mori.
 - Los Angeles, 29 September: It has cost Warner Bros. $75,000 to turn Marlon Brando into an international star. That's the fee this graduate of the Actors Studio received to play Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan's screen version of Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire. Brando, a leading exponent of the Method school of acting, plays the brutish, mumbling Kowalski like a Caliban in a torn t-shirt, smoldering with sex appeal as he circles Vivien Leigh's touchingly faded Southern belle Blanche Dubois. The screenplay, written by Williams, makes some concessions to censorship but retains the steamy atmosphere of the original, in which Brando was directed by Kazan on Broadway. Born in Omaha, NE in 1924, Brando was educated at the Shattuck Military Academy, from which he was expelled, and then studied acting in New York. He made his Broadway debut in 1944, and two years later was voted Broadway's Most Promising Actor. After his triumph in Streetcar in 1947, the movies beckoned, and he made his screen debut in 1950 as an embittered paraplegic in The Men.
- New York, 4 October:
 The inspiration for the sensational new MGM musical, An American in Paris, gres from producer Arthur Freed's attending a George Gershwin concert of the title music and wanting to produce a movie set in Paris starring Gene Kelly. He got Vincente Minnelli to direct, and cast French newcomer Leslie Caron. Her classical training and naïve charm serve her well, especially in the "Our Love Is Here To Stay" number, dancing with Kelly on the banks of the Seine and her solo to "Embraceable You." Oscar Levant performs Gershwin's "Concert in F for Piano and Orchestra." Among other splendid routines is Kelly performing "I Got Rhythm" with a group of street urchins. The film culminates with an 18-minute ballet, in which the city's celebrated landmarks are depicted using the styles of various French painters. An American in Paris has brought the art of the film musical to a new high.
- New York, 7 October: The New York State Censor has refused a license to Max Ophüls' French film La Ronde. They consider the plot of the film to be amoral and outside the boundaries established by the Production Code. In the censor's view, the film shows adultery not as a fall from grace, but as a game.
- Los Angeles, 18 October: Cowboy star Roy Rogers today won a fight begun last June in the State District Court to prevent Republic Pictures from selling or licensing any of his old films for use in TV. Rogers had claimed that the advertisements shown during commercial breaks in his films would suggest he was endorsing the products. He has been granted a permanent injunction.
- New York, 8 November:
 After six months of filming in Rome at a cost of nearly $7 million, the biggest budget Hollywood movie since Gone With the Wind, the 171-minute Technicolor MGM spectacle Quo Vadis? can now be seen on our screens. There had been several silent film adaptations of the Henryk Sienkiewicz novel, but Louis B. Mayer dreamed of making his own version with his studio's vast resources. Two years ago, a company headed by director John Huston and with stars Gregory Peck and Elizabeth Taylor went to Rome to begin shooting, but the production was shut down, with the estimated cost of the debacle set at $2 million. The present second attempt was better budgeted by producer Sam Zimbalist, under trusted director Mervyn LeRoy. This time Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr co-star as the Roman legionnaire and the Christian slave who fall in love, and Peter Ustinov is a raving Nero. Quo Vadis? is the first color film to be made at Cinecittá, and it has given a boost to the Italian studio.
- Hollywood, 19 November: Charles Chaplin has commenced shooting his new film Limelight.
- Cairo, 19 November: Egyptian director Salah Abou Seil's film Lak yum ya zalim (Your Day Will Come), which opens today, is loosely based on Emile Zola's novel Thèse Raquin.
 - New York, 26 December: The extremely unlikely pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen appears to have come off brilliantly. The title refers to a rusty river steamer that takes the two stars down the Congo in German East Africa in 1914, but it is also a vehicle that carries them to new heights in what are essentially character parts. Here Bogart is Charlie Allnut, a scruffy, profane, unshaven, gin-drinking captain of the small trading boat, and Hepburn plays Rose Sayer, a prim, temperance-espousing, scrawny, Bible-quoting spinster missionary. The twosome are thrown together after Hepburn's brother (Robert Morley) is killed by German soldiers, and Bogart peruades her to escape with him. Negotiating rapids, shallows and storms, they finally succeed in blowing up a German gunboat. The director John Huston, who co-wrote the screenplay with James Agee (an adaptation of C. S. Forester's novel) wisely concentrated on the two ripe performances, showing the characters' shared animosity gradually changing into love. Huston has transformed a somewhat improbable adventure-romance, virtually a duologue, into a convincing story of love growing out of shared endurance and delivered with endearing humor. The African Queen is the first Technicolor feature for Huston, Bogart and Hepburn, and was actually shot under difficult conditions in the Belgian Congo. Even though Hepburn contracted a bad case of dysentery, which held up her scenes, she gives one of her most memorable performances.
- Stockholm, 26 December: Opening of Frånskild (Divorced), the latest film from the Swedish director Gustaf Molander, with Inga Tidblad and Alf Kjellin, from an idea suggested by Ingmar Bergman.
- France, 31 December: During the past year, 411 million movie tickets have been sold here.
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30 January - London, England,