- Hollywood, 2 January:
 Cecil B. DeMille has lost none of his cinematic swagger. With his latest, The Greatest Show on Earth, he has proved that there's still a market for 24-karat hokum. With the help of the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circuses, an all-star cast goes over the big top. Here James Stewart plays the clown who hides his criminal past beneath several layers of makeup, Cornel Wilde is the daredevil aerialist the Great Sebastian, and Betty Hutton is the woman who loves and loses him. Newcomer Charlton Heston is the hard-driving manager. There's a spectacular train crash and surprise appearances by Dorothy Lamour, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.
 - Hollywood, 15 January: Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful paints a dyspeptic picture of Hollywood as seen through the career of ambitious producer Kirk Douglas and his relations with fading star Lana Turner, writer Dick Powell and director Barry Sullivan. Turner's role does invite comparison with the turbulent trajectory of Diana Barrymore, daughter of the Great Profile, John Barrymore. Her puffball blonde vulnerability is ruthlessly exploited by Douglas, who predictably moves into overdrive as a prince of heels. Turner's careering car ride when she realizes that Douglas does not really love her is an explosion of emotion, full of delirious camera movement, well-judged bursts of light, deafening music and rapid editing. With this brilliantly controlled melodrama, Minnelli has temporarily abandoned the musicals so closely associated with him for a film of penetrating psychological insight in which individual stories are linked together by his fluid visual style. Outstanding in a supporting role is Gloria Grahame, who narrowly escaped being trampled to death by Lyle Bettger's elephants in The Greatest Show on Earth and is now cast as the irritating Southern belle, bored with the pipe-sucking screenwriter Dick Powell, and consoling herself with Gilbert Roland. A replica Oscar® seen in the office of studio boss Walter Pidgeon suggests that Minnelli is slyly dropping a broad hint to the Academy.
- Bombay, 24 January: The opening of the Indian International Film Festival marks the first festival of cinema in Asia. Forty feature-length films from 21 countries will be screened.
- Paris, 13 February: Jean Gabin and Danielle Darrieux share top billing in La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (The Truth About Baby Donge). Darrieux is directed once again by her ex-husband, Henri Decoin, with whom she has made six films in the past.
- Hollywood, 4 March:
 Ronald Reagan, who divorced Jane Wyman in 1948, has now married another but less well-known actress, Nancy Davis. Reagan, who is also known as "Dutch" to his friends, met Davis on the Waner lot. The fact that she was an MGM contract player was no bar to romance, and it seems that it was a case of love at first sight for the president of the Screen Actors Guild. But Reagan's romantic and political achievements have not recently been matched by his acting career, which has been confined to B-pictures like his latest, She's Working Her Way Through College, directed by second-feature workhorse H. Bruce Humberstone. It's a musical remake of the 1942 The Male Animal, that has Virginia Mayo hogging the limelight as a burlesque queen with aspirations to be a serious actress. Reagan plays the college professor who gets into a tangle with spouse Phyllis Thaxter when he unwisely befriends Mayo.
 - Hollywood, 20 March: The audience at the 24th Academy Awards ceremony was taken completely by surprise when Ronald Colman announced that the Best Picture prize had been awarded to An American in Paris, over the clear favorites, A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun. This notable recognition of the Vincente Minnelli-directed Gene Kelly musical is due mainly to the efforts of the MGM producer Arthur Freed. A master of the genre, Freed was honored with the Irving G. Thalberg Award for his many superb musical productions, which include Babes in Arms, Cabin in the Sky, Meet Me in St. Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, Easter Parade and On the Town. A great judge of talent, former songwriter Freed has always managed to gather quality directors and artists around him. An American in Paris not only captured the biggest award of the evening, but also won five further Oscars® (for Story and Screenplay, Color Cinematography, Color Art Direction, Color Costume Design and Best Score for a Musical Picture). Both of the dramas beaten by the musical were compensated when George Stevens gained the Best Director prize for A Place in the Sun, and A Streetcar Named Desire won three of the four acting awards (Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden and Kim Hunter). It was Humphrey Bogart who came along on the outside to take the Best Actor Oscar® for his drunken, grizzled boat captain in John Huston's The African Queen. Quo Vadis? was the big loser, having been nominated for eight Oscars® and yet coming away empty-handed.
- Paris, 20 March:
 A mischievous, lively and seductive Gérard Philipe swashbuckles his merry way through Fanfan la Tulipe, his third outing under director Christian-Jaque. Here Philipe, as the happy-go-lucky Fanfan, is persuaded to join the army of Louis XV by the recruiting officer's daughter (the voluptuous Gina Lollobrigida). No sooner is he made a soldier than he rescues the king's daughter and Madame Pompadour from coach robbers. Almost single-handedly defeating the Austrian army, Fanfan then realizes all his dreams. This satire on Douglas Fairbanks-style films and historical romance keeps up a rapid pace without sacrificing characterization or wit.
 - Hollywood, 27 March: The dazzling new MGM musical, Singin' in the Rain, has everything: great songs, splendid dances, a wonderful cast, a terrific nostalgia story and hilarious comedy routines, all pacily co-directed by its star Gene Kelly, and Stanley Donen. Screenwriters Adolph Green and Betty Comden had the ingenious idea of making a Hollywood musical about the motion picture industry's painful transition to sound. Months were spent in research to get the feel of the era, and the creators even use some of the original cameras and sound equipment in this picture, while Walter Plunkett's costumes wittily and accurately conjure up the flapper period. It is 1927, and Don Lockwood (Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) are the greatest stars of the silent cinema, but when the talkies come in, it is discovered that Lina has a high-pitched screechy voice. The screen love team seems doomed, until along comes dancer-singer and would-be serious actress Kathy Selden (David Reynolds), who agrees to dub the bitchy Lina's voice. At the finale, when the truth is finally revealed, Don and Kathy become the new stellar team at Monumental Pictures.
Singin' in the Rain cost $2.5 million, but it was worth every cent. The climactic "Broadway Rhythm" ballet, which took up a fifth of the budget, shows Kelly as a hick hoofer arriving in the big city chanting "Gotta dance!" He does certainly get his chance in this routine, dancing with the seductive Cyd Charisse, and also in the liberating title number. As the rain pelts down, Kelly, in love, dispenses with his umbrella, and "laughing at clouds, so dark up above" does literally the splashiest dance ever committed to film. Other high spots include Donald O'Connor's dynamic "Make 'Em Laugh" number, the cheery matinal greeting "Good Morning," delivered by Kelly, Reynolds and O'Connor, and the touching lyrical "You Were Meant for Me." All the songs in this affectionate spoof were written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, aptly dating from another period.
- Tokyo, 3 April:
 The 52-year-old Japanese film director Kenji Mizoguchi, a number of whose previous pictures had been flops, risked everything to make Saikaku ichidai onna (The Life of O-Haru), an adaptation from Saikuku's classic picaresque novel. It must surely be that the quality of the film will finally mark this director's recognition in the Wst since it tells the universal story of women's suffering. O-Haru (Kinuyo Tanaka, a great performance), the daughter of a samurai, falls in love with a man from a lower social class (Toshiro Mifune). After he is beheaded, she is forced to become the mistress of the head of a great clan in order to bear him an heir. Her duty done, she is dismissed from the palace, and then descends from marriage to a poor merchant, who is later killed, to becoming a beggar and a prostitute. Without sentimentality or morializing, Mizoguchi watches the various moments of crisis and violence from a discreet distance, deepening our sympathy for the characters.
 - New York, 4 April: Susan Hayward, one of the gutsiest leading ladies in Hollywood, is in top form in Fox's new tearjerking musical biopic, With a Song in My Heart. Hayward stars as singer Jane Froman, whose career was nearly wrecked by a wartime air crash that left her crippled. Much of the film is devoted to Froman's courageous battle to recover, with Hayward giving the punchiest performance in a musical since James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy. The songs -- including the splendid rendition of the title number -- have been dubbed by Froman, and the skillful musical direction and choreography are, respectively, by Alfred Newman and Billy Daniels. David Wayne and Rory Calhoun portray the men in Froman's life, and the gravel-voiced Thelma Ritter is fourth-billed as the woman who nursed the singer back to health, in the process of becoming a life-long friend. Also making an impression as a handsome young paratrooper suffering from shellshock is newcomer Robert Wagner, who made his screen debut in 1950 in The Halls of Montezuma.
- Hollywood, 5 April: Howard Hughes has announced the temporary closure of RKO Studios to facilitate the dismissal of close to 100 employees suspected of having Communist sympathies.
- Washington, DC, 10 April: Today Elia Kazan denounced 15 of his former colleagues to the HUAC. Earlier this year, Kazan had admitted membership in the Communist Party from 1934 to 1936, but had refused to name any of his friends. He claims that his change of heart is due to a new appreciation of the dangers inherent in the Communist doctrine. His recent picture Viva Zapata!, with Marlon Brando, is openly anti-Communist.
- Tokyo, 24 April: Completed in August 1945, Akira Kurosawa's film, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, is only now being released in Japan as the American Army censors had prohibited it because of its feudal ideology.
- Paris, 9 May:
 In 1940, as refugees flee from the Germans, an orphaned five-year-old girl and the young son of a peasant family who takes her in, build a cemetery for animals, stealing crosses from the churchyard to do so. This is the basis for René Clément's new film Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games), a moving document about the effects of war on children. At its center are wonderfully natural performances from little Brigitte Fossey and young Georges Poujouly.
- Washington, DC, 25 May: The Supreme Court has delivered a unanimous verdict in favor of the distributor of Roberto Rossellini's film The Miracle. The Court ruled that the cinema has the right to constitutional guarantees protecting freedom of expression. Until now, the law has regarded the cinema as "a purely commercial venture."
 - Paris, 4 June: With his Le Petit monde de Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo), director Julien Duvivier provides a treat for lovers of warm-hearted comedy and of Fernandel. He plays Giovanni Guareschi's creation, the scheming country priest who conducts conversations with God as well as a running feud with Peppone, the local Communist mayor (Gino Cervi). If in secret they like and even admire each other, their politics and religion divide them, just as their country is divided. And when the mayor wants his "People's House," the priest wants his "Garden City" for the poor. However, they declare a truce to help a modern Romeo and Juliet, Franco Interlenghi and Vera Talqui.
- New York, 1 July: The new projection system known as Cinerama was put on display for the first time last night before an invited audience at the Broadway Theater. Thrills and scenic wonders combine to impressive effect on this sweeping wide-angle (146°) screen which is also higher than ordinary screens, and added impact is provided by "sterophonic" sound. The tri-panel panoramic picture is thrown from three projectors but looks like a single picture.
- Mexico, 14 July: Luis Buñuel has begun shooting Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, from the novel by Daniel Defoe, with Dan O'Herlihy. Produced by Oscar Dancigers, it is Buñuel's first feature film in color.
- Hollywood, 24 July:
 Gary Cooper has brought a poor run of films to an end with his performance in Fred Zinnemann's challenging High Noon. He is sheriff Will Kane, the retiring lawman, troubled, decent and showing his age, who has to buckle on his gunbelt one last time to deal single-handedly with the return of an old enemy, Frank Miller, and his gang. It's Kane's wedding day, and Tex Ritter's plaintive singing of the Dimitri Tiomkin-Ned Washington ballad "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'" provides a haunting background to the action, which unfolds in "real time." Grace Kelly plays his Quaker bride, and there are strong performances from Katy Jurado as an old flame and Lloyd Bridges as Kane's cowardly deputy. A debate is raging in Hollywood now about the deeper meaning of the film. Liberals claim that the picture, with its pessimistic view of civic responsibility during a crisis, is a metaphor for the American public's failure to unite against the ravages of McCarthyism.
 - New York, 7 August: For several years Joan Crawford has been stalking grimly into middle age, seemingly determined to play both the male and female leads in her movies. And young men have become figures of menace in her pictures, not the least of which is Jack Palance in Sudden Fear. Palance, whose strikingly taut features are the result of wartime plastic surgery, is cast as wealthy playwright Crawford's sponging husband, plotting with floozy Gloria Grahame to bump her off. Crawford stumbles on their scheme, and her attempt to use her dramatist's skills to try turning the tables on the unlovely couple lead to a crackling climax in a suspenser tightly orchestrated by the director David Miller. Palance made an impressive movie debut in 1950 as the plague-carrying criminal in Panic in the Streets.
- Quebec, 21 August: Alfred Hitchcock begins shooting for I Confess, starring Montgomery Clift in the role of a priest.
- Venice, 1 September: At this year's festival here, the Golden Lion has been won by René Clément for Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games), while Fredric March won the Volpi award for best actor in Death of a Salesman. The jury's special prize went to a French cartoon by Paul Grimault, La Bergère el le ramoneur (The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird), from a script by Jacques Prévert. No prize was given to an actress this year.
- London, 4 September: Opening of Operation Burma (a.k.a. Objective, Burma!). The controversial film was accused of being a travesty of the Burma campaign by the British. It was taken off a week after its opening in 1945.
- Washington, DC, 19 September: James McGranery, US Attorney General, has announced that he has ordered the immigration services to refuse Charles Chaplin entry to America until the conclusions of the inquiry into his political activities are known.
- London, 23 September: Charles Chaplin has been warmly welcomed by his countrymen on his return to England with his wife and family after a 21-year absence.
- London, 9 October: Gala premiere at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square of David Lean's The Sound Barrier (known in the US as Breaking the Sound Barrier).
- Paris, 15 October: The 87-year-old actress formerly known as Jehanne d'Alcy and now Madame Charlotte Méliès, widow of Georges Méliès, appears in some scenes in Georges Franju's documentary film Le Grand Méliès.
- London, 23 October:
 Charles Chaplin's Limelight has its world premier today at the Odeon cinema, Leicester Square. This is a deeply personal film in which Chaplin slips back into the Edwardian music hall of his youth to bring us Calvero, the broken-down comedian who nurses a young, paralyzed ballerina back to health. Poignant reminders of Chaplin's past include the appearance of his one-time leading lady Edna Purviance as an extra, and a brief, brilliant double-act with his great silent rival Buster Keaton. The crippled dancer Terry is touchingly played by 21-year-old British actress Claire Bloom. The premiere has been accompanied by a political storm. Two weeks after he sailed for Britain with his wife and four children, the US Attorney General, James McGranery, announced that Chaplin would be required to face a hearing if he opted to return to the United States, as he was suspected of being a member of the Communist Party who displayed a "leering, sneering" attitude toward America. Chaplin's socialist beliefs, successive scandals, and his refusal to take out US citizenship, have provided his enemies with the pretext to exclude him from America.
- Berlin, 1 November: Charles Chaplin has refused to allow Limelight to be distributed here unless German audiences are first able to see The Great Dictator.
- London, 23 November: French actress Edwige Feuillère has been elected "Star of Stars" by The Sunday Graphic.
- Hollywood, 28 November: The Hollywood premier of Arch Oboler's much advertised 3-D film Bwana Devil -- the first full-lenth feature filmed entirely in the new process -- which co-stars Robert Stack and Barbara Britton, brought screams from the audience as a lion appeared to leap from the screen. The audience wore polaroid glasses to obtain the full 3-D effect.
- London, 1 December: Serge Reggiani, Claude Dauphin and Simone Signoret are in the British capital to dub Jacques Becker's film Casque d'or (Golden Marie).
- Hollywood, 20 December: Opening of Harry Horner's anti-Communist science fiction film called Red Planet Mars, in which two scientists, an American and a German, captured by the Soviets, must persuade the Martians to incite revolution in the United States.
 - Paris, 21 December: Eighteen-year-old actress Brigitte Bardot married director Roger Vadim in a civil ceremony yesterday. The couple will celebrate a religious ceremony in the parish church in Passy today.
- Los Angeles, 24 December:
 The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers' tender and haunting novel about the loneliness and confusion of an adolescent girl in the Deep South, comes to the screen, using the Broadway cast from the play version. Directed with absolute fidelity to the material by Fred Zinnemann, this tale of a motherless girl, whose only companions are the family cook (Ethel Waters) and her small cousin (Brandon de Wilde), and who wants to accompany her brother on his honeymoon, marks the screen debut of Julie Harris. The 22-year-old Harris, waif-like and brilliant, is memorable as 12-year-old Frankie. Filmed in Calusa, a small town in California built by Southerners, the atmosphere is authentic. Already dismissed as "art house" by certain critics, the movie is a gem for the discriminating.
- New York, 24 December: Paramount releases Daniel Mann's Come Back, Little Sheba, starring Burt Lancaster and Shirley Booth as Doc and Lola Delaney, and featuring Terry Moore and Richard Jaeckel.
- New York, 25 December: Premiere of Fox's My Cousin Rachel, adapted by Nunnally Johnson from Daphne Du Maurier's novel, and directed by Henry Koster. The film stars Olivia De Havilland and Hollywood newcomer Richard Burton. This could prove to be Burton's breakthrough film.
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3 January - USA, 
8 December - Toronto, Ontario, Canada,