- Rome, 8 January: Opening of Roberto Rossellini's Europa 51 with Ingrid Bergman, Alexander Knox and Giulietta Masina; this is the second Bergman-Rossellini collaboration.
- Paris, 16 January: Marcel Pagnol's latest film Manon des sources is a wonderfully told story of fortitude and revenge. The cast is headed by Jacqueline Pagnol, Rellys and Henri Poupon.
- New York, 21 January:
 One of cinema fiction's more implausibly married couples, Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe, are at the stormy center of Henry Hathaway's Niagara. Monroe, whose wiggling walk is attracting increasingly frenzied attention, is cast here as Rose Loomis, the nymphomaniac wife of wizened war veteran Cotten, whose plane to dispose of her husband at the honeymooners' paradise go fatally awry. First co-consipirator Richard Allan winds up in the river, and then Monroe is strangled by a vengeful Cotten before he cuts loose on a rampage with a honeymooner as a hostage. The posters promise "Marilyn Monroe and Niagara -- a raging torrent of emotion that even nature can't control!" Monroe's ripe sexuality, already seen in flashes in The Asphalt Jungle, Monkey Business and They Clash by Night, has now earned her top billing. Sultrily singing her way through "Kiss," or tossing teasingly on her motel bed with only a sheet to cover her naked body, she sets the screen crackling with sexual static.
 - Reno, 26 January: Actress Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan have just gotten a divorce in Reno, Nevada. The couple had been separated for several months, and Hayworth had declared in an interview she gave last September that it was "impossible to continue with a marriage which has brought nothing but unhappiness. I want a divorce." To demonstrate her determination, she has agreed to start work on a new film, Affair in Trinidad, directed by Vincent Sherman, her first since 1948. Her co-star here will be Glenn Ford, with whom she struck sparks in Gilda. She married Aly Khan at Vallauris, in France, on 27 May 1949 and then gave birth to a daughter, Yasmin, the following December. She has one other child, Rebecca, born in 1944 from her marriage to Orson Welles.
- Hollywood, 1 February: Twentieth Century-Fox has announced that all its films will be made in CinemaScope. The studio recently bought up the rights for the wide-screen process from French inventor and optical scientist, Henri Chrétien
- Stockholm, 9 February:
 After the bleakness and bitterness of some of his earlier films, such as Crisis, A Ship to India and Night Is My Future, the principal setting of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's latest film, Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika), gives the impression that he has changed. However, like several of his previous films, this deals with adolescents struggling against an unfeeling grown-up world, and for whom the director sees little hope. But Bergman's photographer Gunnar Fischer has brilliantly captured the transient sun-soaked Swedish summer days, the only period of happiness for the young couple before the encroachment of autumn and reality. Monika (Harriet Andersson) is an irresponsible teenage girl who spends her summer holiday alone on an island with a young clerk (Lars Ekborg), sunbathing, swimming and making love. She soon gets pregnant, and leaves the poor boy literally holding the baby. The two young leads, especially the minkish Andersson, give this simple tale a remarkable veracity.
- London, 11 February: As part of a festival of French films here in the capital, René Clair's Les Belles de nuit (Night Beauties) is to be shown in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II.
 - New York, 19 February: The much publicized Bwana Devil, made in 3-D by Arch Oboler on a shoestring budget as an experimental venture, has opened here. The film, which caused a furor at its Hollywood premiere last year, has been somewhat loosely called "the Jazz Singer of 3-D." In the film, British railway workers in Kenya are becoming the favorite snack of two man-eating lions. Head engineer Bob Hayward (Robert Stack) becomes obsessed with trying to kill the beasts before they maul everyone on his crew. The posters promise "A Lion in Your Lap!" and "A Lover in Your Arms!" However, several critics have voiced doubts as to whether this new technique really enhances the artistic or dramatic quality of motion pictures.
- Paris, 27 February:
 For his second feature, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, Jacques Tati refused to revive the postman hero from Jour de fête. Declining the many suggestions offered by producers, the actor-director preferred to create a new character, Monsieur Hulot. This amiable and bumbling bachelor was inspired by a sergeant Tati knew in the army and a clumsy architect named Hulot. The film took over a year to shoot, from July 1951 to October 1952, at the Boulogne-Billancourt studios and on location in Brittany. The film concentrates on how M. Hulot, during his summer vacation at a small seaside resort, inadvertently sparks off a series of mishaps. Hulot, invariably wearing a hat, overcoat and rather too short trousers, smoking a pipe and walking as if against a strong wind, is not only the instigator of incidents but also an observer of the idiosyncracies of the French middle class at the seaside. There is very little dialogue or plot -- the film is a running series of comic episodes, climaxing with Hulot setting fire to a shed full of fireworks -- the gentle humor resides in Tati's body language and in the superbly controlled soundtrack.
- Hollywood, 5 March: Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, the brother of writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, has died. He wrote numerous screenplays and adaptations and was largely responsible for the Academy Award-winning screenplay of Citizen Kane, which he wrote in collaboration with Orson Welles. He was also an executive producer of several films in the 1930s.
- Paris, 13 March: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin is finally seeing a general release. Made in 1925, the film remained banned in France due to political censorship; until now it has only been shown in cinema clubs.
- Hollywood, 18 March: MGM has decided not to develop its own system of wide-screen filming but rather to use the CinemaScope process under license from Fox.
- Hollywood, 19 March:
 After years of having rejected the advances of television, the Academy has succumbed at last, and this year's Awards show was beamed to 80 million viewers all across the country. They saw Shirley Booth, winner of the Best Actress award for Come Back, Little Sheba, as she ran up the red-carpeted stairs of the International Theater to collect her prize, almost tripping over her long gown. In her breathless acceptance speech, the 45-year-old stage actress remarked, "I guess this is the peak." Although she has won the Oscar® for her screen debut, Booth had played the role of the slovenly wife of an alcoholic more than 1,000 times in William Inge's play on Broadway. In contrast, the Best Actor winner was the veteran movie star Gary Cooper, who took the award for his tortured portrayal of the lone sheriff forced to face four outlaws on his wedding day in Fred Zinnemann's High Noon. The Oscars® were distributed more evenly this year than most, with John Ford as the Best Director for The Quiet Man, and Cecil B. De Mille's circus spectacle, The Greatest Show on Earth, if not exactly living up to its lofty title, considered Best Picture.
- Paris, 24 March: Orson Welles has appeared before the Board of Arbitration at the request of set designer Alexandre Trauner, who claims 2 millon francs are owed to him for his work on the sets for Welles' Othello.
 - Tokyo, 26 March: It is very often the case that films most deeply embedded in a national tradition and culture possess universal characteristics. Such a film is Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of the Pale and Silvery Moon After Rain), Kenji Mizoguchi's new work. Simultaneously violent and contemplative, the film embraces four typical Japanese genres: the historic fresco, the elegiac poem, the fantastic tale and the Kabuki theater. The result is a work of captivating beauty and refinement. It is the story of a poor porter, trying to make a living in a war-torn medieval village, who is lured away from his devoted wife by a mysterious woman, who turns out to be a ghost. When he returns home repentant, his wife, too, has become a ghost. Mizoguchi recounts the tales, based on two 18th-century ghost stories by Akinari Veda, and one by Guy de Maupassant, using lyrical, haunting and intense images that never ignore the human element. His artistry is best demonstrated by the trip across the lake as the boat emerges from the mist, hinting at the supernatural; and also the final sequence when the porter sees the phantom vision of his dead wife where there was emptiness before.
- Mexico, 3 April: Gérard Philipe has arrived in Alvaro for the filming of Yves Allégret's Les Orgueilleux (The Proud Ones). His co-star Michele Morgan will join him there.
- Los Angeles, 6 April:
 Recently in contract disputes with Paramount, Alan Ladd suddenly found himself back in the big league with Shane, a suberb Western directed by George Stevens. Ladd is the buckskin-clad guardian angel protecting homesteaders from hired killer Jack Palance. Told from the viewpoint of a small boy, Brandon de Wilde, Shane seamlessly blends a realistic approach to the Wyoming range wars as well as a sure grasp of American history, with a distillation of many of the most potent myths that characterize the Western film.
- New York, 25 April: The press and trade were invited to a demonstration of 20th Century-Fox CinemaScope, the wide-screen projection system supplemented by stereophonic sound, in the Roxy Theater this morning. Trailers of forthcoming Fox films were shown on a screen measuring 65 by 25 feet. A tribute was paid to Henri Chrétien who perfected the anamorphic lens used for the process.
 - Cannes, 29 April: Since the opening of the Cannes Film Festival two weeks ago, autograph hunters, photographers and film fans have had a field day. Errol Flynn, gary cooper, kirk douglas, Yves Montand, Silvana Mangano and many others have been gently jostled by the enthusiastic crowd. Meanwhile, the jury was engaged in more serious activities, watching dozens of films from all over the world to dig out the rare pearls worthy of being awarded a prize. The selection this year has been particularly rich, with the president Jean Cocteau, and the others on the jury, being offered a veritable cornucopia of film. This explains why the prizes have been awarded to seven of the 28 participating nations. However, by unanimous consent, it was France, with Henri-Georges Clouzot's film Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear), that gained the well-deserved Grand Prix.
 Inspired by a novel by Georges Arnaud, Clouzot's screenplay focuses on four down-and-out adventurers (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter Van Eyck and Folco Lulli) languishing in a festering South American town. They agree to risk their lives transporting two truckloads of highly dangerous nitroglycerine over treacherous roads to an oil field 300 miles away, where it is needed to blow up a burning oil well. Only one of them survives to claim his wages. The extremely suspenseful film, that matches anything Hollywood can produce in the same genre, gripped the audience from start to finish. It is not only an action film, however, but also a powerful study of failure. Clouzot, who filmed on location in the South of France, has brilliantly created the sweaty atmosphere of the tropics where his disenchanted and greedy characters are put through the mill. The actors, too, including the director's wife Vera Clouzot, found the shooting particularly grueling, thanks to the challenging physical demands of the plot. For his performance, Charles Vanel was compensated with the best actor prize.
- Washington, DC, 7 May: Producer Robert Rossen, who has previously refused to speak at the HUAC hearings, now admits to having been a member of the Communist Party from 1937 to 1947 and has named 57 others.
- Los Angeles, 4 June: Opening of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar from the Shakespeare play, with Marlon Brando, James Mason and John Gielgud.
 - Hollywood, 4 June: Hollywood, in its competition with television, is currently adopting an ostensibly daring approach to subjects previously thought risqué or taboo. Sex is getting a more frank treatment, and audiences watching Otto Preminger's film version of the stage hit, The Moon Is Blue, released without a Production Code Seal of Approval, can hear words such as "virgin" and "seduce." The virgin in question is Maggie McNamara, who is circled by a predatory William Holden in a comedy that has defied the censors.
- Hollywood, 5 June: Entertainer Dooley Wilson, best known for performing "As Time Goes By" in response to Ingrid Bergman's "Play it, Sam..." in Casablanca, has died.
- Paris, 1 July: French-born Hollywood star Claudette Colbert is in Paris to make her first French film, Sacha Guitry's Si Versailles m'etait conté (Royal Affairs in Versailles).
- London, 8 July: René Clément is shooting Monsieur Ripois with Gérard Philipe. Clément and his British cameraman, Oswald Morris, are filming as much as possible in street locations here.
- Paris, 14 July: Abel Gance, assisted by Argentinian journalist Nelly Kaplan, whom he met at Cannes, is filming the Bastille Day celebrations in the capital in Eastmancolor using the Polyvision multiple-image process and sterophonic sound.
- New York, 5 August:
 Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity is a toned-down but still powerful film adaptation of James Jones' steamy novel of Army life in Hawaii in the days before the Japanese stuck at Pearl Harbor. A high-voltage cast ensures that the robust flavor of the original is transferred to the screen. Burt Lancaster plays tough top Sergeant Milt Warden, and in the pivotal role of the victimized boxer/bugler Robert E. Lee Prewitt, Montgomery Clift gives a superbly judged performance, one almost guaranteed to garner an Oscar® nomination. Prewitt's conviction that "If a man don't go his own way, he's nothin'," bears more than a passing resemblance to the actor's own credo. Nevertheless, the revelations of this movie are Deborah Kerr and Frank Sinatra. Hollywood has always reserved a pedestal for stately British leading ladies, cool and graceful actresses under whose gentility there might lurk a streak of sensuality. Kerr, in America since 1947, has been confined mainly to decorative roles in melodramas and adventure films, but in From Here to Eternity she has abandoned restraint to play the nymphomaniac Karen Holmes, taking an illicit tumble in the surf with Lancaster. But for actor-singer Frank Sinatra, this has been a make-or-break movie. Since 1949, when he left MGM, his career has been in a free fall. His marriage to Ava Gardner foundered, he flopped on TV, was taken up and dropped by Universal and then let go by Columbia Records. Sinatra was in dire straits when he pleaded for, and got, the part of the brow-beaten Italian G.I. Maggio in From Here to Eternity at the knock-down salary of $8,000 a week. Now he's hit the comeback trail and must be in the running for an Oscar®.
 - New York, 5 August: Glenn Ford, who achieved stardom opposite Rita Hayworth in Gilda, is one of Hollywood's most likable actors, radiating genial, relaxed sincerity. However, he is currently displaying the steel that lies under the smiling surface in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, in which he plays an idealistic cop whose campaign against mobster Alexander Scourby turns into a grim personal vendetta after his wife is blown up by a car bomb. He is befriended by gangster's moll Gloria Grahame, who, for her pains, is horribly burned when the brutish hoodlum Lee Marvin throws a pot of scalding coffee in her face. She does the same to him in the film's finale, but perishes herself in the way of tarnished women who come to the aid of movie heroes. It's a remarkable and unsettling performance, that prompted Picturegoer magazine to comment, "If she were more synthetic, producers might not be so wary of her particular kind of explosive sex appeal. But she's very real, too real perhaps." Maybe the wide-eyed, pouting Grahame, with her small Southern-accented voice, is an actress just a little too out of the ordinary to take a conventional path to film stardom.
- Paris, 9 August: American producer Samuel Goldwyn has organized a pre-release screening of his lates film, Hans Christian Andersen, from director Charles Vidor.
- Corsier-sur-Vevey, 23 August:
 The fifth child of Charles and Oona Chaplin, a boy who will be named Eugene, was born today. This joyous event comes at the end of many turbulent months for the Chaplins, who have now settled in Switzerland in an elegant villa, set in 37 acres of parkland, which they bought from a former US ambassador for a reported $100,000. Chaplin will not be returning to the United States. On 19 September last year, after he and his family sailed for Europe, US authorities rescinded his re-entry permit. The following November, Oona Chaplin returned to America to wind up her husband's business affairs. Meanwhile, many movie houses in America canceled showings of his Limelight. It was some small consolation that at the beginning of March this year Limelight was voted best film by the Foreign Language Press Critics in America. Only one month later Chaplin surrendered his US re-entry permit, declaring, "I have been the object of lies and vicious propaganda by powerful reactionary groups who, by their influence and with the aid of America's yellow press, have created an unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal minded individuals can be singled out and persecuted... I find it virtually impossible to continue my motion picture work, and I have therefore given up my residence in the United States."
 - New York, 27 August: William Wyler's Roman Holiday is a romantic, bittersweet account of 24 hours in the life of a young European princess. On a state visit to Rome, she rebels against the constraints of her royal existence and goes AWOL. Drowsy and disoriented, she is found by an American newsman who is looking for a scoop and shows her the sights of the Eternal City. The film has premiered here with the sweet smell of instant success, not least thanks to its leading lady, newcomer Audrey Hepburn. This European gamine captivated both Wyler and her co-star Gregory Peck during the arduous location filming in the heat of Rome, and she has received a rapturous reception from the first audiences.
- Venice, 4 September:
 The Venice Film Festival failed to award a Golden Lion this year, but elected instead to hand out six Silver Lions to honor a range of diverse but equally brilliant films. They are The Little Fugitive, a highly imaginative story of a boy in Coney Island who believes he has committed a murder, directed on a low budget by Morris Engel and hs wife Ruth Orkin; Kenji Mizoguchi's magnificent Ugetsu Monogatari, a supernatural tale of love deceived; Alexander Ptouchko's Sadka, a Sovcolor version of Rimsky-Korsakov's fairytale opera from the Soviet Union; Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni, about idle youth in a resort town; Marcel Carné's Zola adaptation, Thérèse Raquin; and John Huston's Moulin Rouge. Huston's re-creation of late 19th-century Paris was perhaps the most appreciated of all, with the 20-minute opening sequence especially applauded. With its kaleidoscopic color, imaginative cutting and evocative sets and costumes, we get to see the celebrated cabaret of the title through the eyes of French artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (José Ferrer). In a series of tableaux vivants, the cancan, singer Jane Avril (Zsa Zsa Gabor) and other entertainments burst onto the screen. Based on Pierre La Mure's book about the painter, it deals with his hopeless affair with a whore (Colette Marchand), his platonic relationship with his model (Suzanne Flon), and his descent into alcoholism. Ferrer, who had to play the role on his knees, is utterly convincing as the suffering, dwarf-like Lautrec.
- Turin, 7 September: Lana Turner has married for the fourth time. Her new husband is the former screen Tarzan, Lex Barker. Miss Turner is reported to have fainted during the wedding ceremony.
- Stockholm, 14 September: Ingmar Bergman's Gycklarnas Afton (Sawdust and Tinsel) with Ake Gröberg and Harriet Andersson which opens today is a sad tale set in a shabby touring circus.
- New York, 16 September:
 Following on the launch of the first 3-D movies and Cinerama last year, the cinema has now gone in for giganticism with the opening at the Roxy of The Robe, the first fiction feature film in 20th Century-Fox's new process called CinemaScope. The Robe itself is a rather uninspired Biblical epic, that stars Richard Burton, Victor Mature and Jean Simmons, and is directed by Henry Koster, but CinemaScope is impressive enough to hope its sweep will be used on better material.
- New York, 25 September: Alfred Hitchcock has finished filming Dial M for Murder, adapted from the stage success of the same name and starring Ray Milland, Grace Kelly and Robert Cummings.
- New York, 9 October: John Ford's new film, Mogambo, with Clark Gable, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly opens today. Kelly, who plays the role originally offered to gene tierney in this jungle romance, confesses she made the film for three reasons: Ford, Gable and a trip to Africa.
- Carson City, 31 October: In spite of the intervention of Frank Sinatra's mother in an attempt to reconcile her son to his wife of three years, Ava Gardner, the separation of the couple has become official. The final night they spent together was a month ago when they met in Palm Springs, CA. Sinatra had just wound up a series of singing engagements at the Riviera, and Gardner had returned from Ireland where she was shooting Knights of the Round Table in which she plays Guinevere. On 27 October, MGM announced that the two stars had separated. And today Sinatra confirmed this at a press conference here. The couple had a history of fighting and making up. At one stage, in fact, Ava threw away a mink coat Frank had bought her as a peace offering. It was the second marriage for both of them, and those who know them would be very surprised if it was the last for either.
- New York, 4 November:
 Doris Day is at her most effervescent in the title role of Calamity Jane, a horse-musical that bears a striking resemblance to Annie Get Your Gun. She and Howard Keel, her opponent/lover in a battle of the sexes, do full justice to the breezy Sammy Fain-Paul Francis Webster songs, such as "The Deadwood Stage," "I Just Blew in from the Windy City" and "The Black Hills of Dakota." But the big hit of the picture is Doris touchingly crooning "Secret Love" -- leaning against a tree, on horseback, and on top of a hill -- at the top of her voice. The hugely popular blonde singing star, renowned for her freshly-scrubbed looks, remains grimy throughout, only emerging at the end from the chrysalis of tomboyhood into the butterfly of femininity to charm Keel as "Wild Bill" Hickock, her "Secret Love."
- Los Angeles, 10 November: Disney releases The Living Desert, a documentary in the "True Life Adventure" series that presents a day in the life of creatures living in a desert in the southwestern US. Toads, reptiles, wild pigs, insects, mice and birds are followed going about their daily routine and the struggle to find food and not become it themselves.
  - Los Angeles, 10 November: Gold diggers Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable rent a plush Manhattan penthouse as the first move in a determined manhunt in Jean Negulesco's How to Marry a Millionaire. Bacall is the one who winds up with the millionaire of the title, seemingly poor working stiff Cameron Mitchell. Earlier this year Monroe and Jane Russell memorably co-starred as an equally formidable pair of floozies, the two big girls from Little Rock in Howard Hawks' entertaining adaptation of Anita Loos' smash-hit musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. As the gold-digging Lorelei Lee, Monroe was superb, breathily singing "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." And Russell weighed in with an extraordinary routine in a ship's gymnasium, warbling "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love" while fondling ranks of compliant musclemen. All in all, it's a good cinematic year for gals who know what they want and go out to get it.
- Hollywood, 11 November: According to a report prepared for the Screen Actors Guild, which represents over 8,000 professional performers, movie production is at an "all-time low." The report, furthermore, states that is sees little hope for immediate improvement. The preoccupation with new, expensive film technology and an increase in overseas production were blamed for the slump here. Directors have pledged to fight against inroads of "runaway foreign film production," and "to promote additional production" in America.
- 25 November, Washington, DC: The Library of Congress has issued two supplementary volumes of its Catalogue of Copyright Entries. All films registered from 1894 through 1949 are listed. The complete publication now apparently runs to a daunting and impressive 76,000 titles.
- New York, 30 December:
 The leather-jacketed bikers who have been terrorizing America have now invaded the screens in Laslo Benedek's The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando. The film was inspired by an incident in 1947 when a group of 4,000 motorcyclists decided to celebrate the Fourth of July by descending on the small California town of Hollister. After its brilliant opening sequence in which we see the bikers roar into town, the film concentrates on the anti-social behavior of "The Black Rebels," the most vicious of them being Johnny (Brando) and Chino (Lee Marvin). But Johnny's romantic encounter with the daughter (Mary Murphy) of the town's ineffectual cop brings out the contradictory nature of his personality. Brando manages to express these two diverse elements -- violence and sensitivity -- in a tour de force performance.
- Stockholm, 30 December: Fritz Lang's The Blue Gardenia opens here today. In this film noir thriller, Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter) is a pretty telephone operator engaged to a soldier overseas. On her birthday, she gets a "Dear John" letter from him. Feeling despondent, she agrees to a date with a wolf from her office (Raymond Burr). He gets her drunk and leads her back to his apartment, where she resists his advances and bludgeons him in self-defense. She flees leaving behind the blue gardenia he bought her. Waking up the next morning with the past evening a veritable blank, she discovers herself the prime suspect in a murder case trumpeted into a sensationalistic headline story by calculating columnist Richard Conte. Lang transforms the rather conventional low-budget thriller into a paranoid nightmare, his cheap sets and flat backdrops creating a tawdry world peopled by cynics and opportunists preying on the guileless, and Baxter makes every guilt-ridden moment palpable. Like in many film noir thrillers, the pat conclusion seems wholly arbitrary, the product of the Hollywood happy-ending machine. However, Lang's film isn't about the mystery, but the experience of an innocent whose single, desperate transgression turns her world upside down. -- Amazon.com
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30 January - Fresno, CA, 
3 August - Los Angeles,