- Paris, 1 January: Cahiers du Cinéma has published an outspoken attack on "certain trends in French films" written by André Bazin's young protégé François Truffaut, in which Truffaut compares the rejected scenario of Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche's Diary of a Country Priest, adapted from Georges Bernanos' work, with the film made by Robert Bresson. And he concludes with: "Of what value is an anti-bourgeois film made by a bourgeois for the bourgoisie?"
- Paris, 8 January: American screen comedian and filmmaker Buster Keaton, taken on by the Medrano Circus, makes his debut with the company tonight, when he will perform a sketch.
- New York, 8 January: The New York critics have voted André Cayatte's French film, Justice est faite (Justice Is Done) as the best foreign film shown in the United States during 1953. Cayatte and Charles Spaak co-wrote the script for this ironic examination of the French legal system. Both of them are former lawyers.
- New York, 26 January: The film rights to Charles A. Lindbergh's autobiography The Spirit of St. Louis have been acquired by director Billy Wilder and Broadway producer Leland Hayward for what is reported to be the highest price paid by Hollywood for a literary work -- an estimated $1 million.
- 1 February, Korea: Marilyn Monroe is on a tour of the battle front, boosting morale by entertaining the troops.
- Hollywood, 16 February: David O. Selznick voiced his anger over use of a Gone With the Wind clip in a birthday salute to MGM on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Selznick feels it is misrepresentation as the film was not an MGM production.
- Hollywood, 2 March: Clark Gable has announced that he is leaving MGM after 23 years there under contract. His annual salary was $500,000. It is not yet known whether other studios have made an approach to the star.
- Paris, 17 March:
 With Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (Honor Among Thieves), Jean Gabin has finally managed to dispose of the image long associated with him about his choice of roles -- that of the good-natured working-class fellow, on whom tragic misfortune always lands. In Becker's movie, adapted from the gangster novel by Albert Simonin, Gabin paints us a poignant portrait of Max the Liar, an aging hoodlum on a search for respectability who dreams of drawing his pension in a few years. What primarily interested Becker was not the cops and robbers plot -- after a bank robbery, the gang fights to the death over the loot -- but rather an exploration of friendship and betrayal among the characters.
 - New York, 18 March: Howard Hughes has gained total control of RKO for $23.5 million, making him the first individual ever to wholly own a motion picture company. However, RKO's prospects look bleak. Hughes is a reclusive aviation enthusiast who, in 1923 at the age of 18, inherited an industrial empire from his father. He has been involved in films since the mid-1920s. He made his name in the industry as the producer-director of Hell's Angels in 1930, launching the career of Jean Harlow, one of the first of dozens of starlets he has compulsively signed to long-term contracts. Jane Russell, busty star of The Outlaw, is another. Hughes' behavior has become increasingly bizarre following a serious air crash in 1946. And since he acquired a controlling interest in RKO in 1948, his decisions have nearly bankrupted the studio.
- 19 March, Los Angeles: Responding to rumors predicting an imminent breakup, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis state: "We do indeed intend to dissolve our team... on 25 July 1996, for the 50th anniversary of our partnership."
- Hollywood, 25 March:
 One movie dominated this year's Oscar® ceremony: Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity. Impressively, it has matched the record held by Gone With the Wind by nabbing eight Academy Awards®. Included in those is that of Best Supporting Actor to Frank Sinatra, a man coming back from bankruptcy, falling popularity and divorce settlement. His first dramatic role as Pvt. Maggio has given him a new lease on life. Donna Reed, Best Supporting Actress, also took advantage of having a meatier role than usual as the nightclub dancer-cum-prostitute. Other awards received were Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Sound Recording and Best Editing. The Best Actor and Actress nods went to an old hand (William Holden) and a fresh young thing (Audrey Hepburn) for Stalag 17 and Roman Holiday, respectively. Holden, like Reed and Sinatra, was cast against type in Billy Wilder's POW comedy-drama, portraying a wheeling-and-dealing sergeant. Although Roman Holiday was Hepburn's seventh film, in which she portrays a princess on a spree, it was the first that she carried on her frail shoulders, becoming nearly overnight one of Hollywood's most bewitching stars.
The Academy also honored Bausch and Lomb Optical Co. with a special award for their contribution to the advancement of the motion picture industry. On the artistic side, Greta Garbo, who never won the Oscar® despite her legendary success, was finally honored with a statuette for "her unforgettable screen performances," as was Danny Kaye "for his unique talents, his service to the Academy, the motion picture industry and the American people."
 - Tokyo, 31 March: Kenji Mizoguchi has consolidated the great international success of Ugetsu Monogatari last year with a slightly more realistic, but no less impressive, film called Sansho Dayu (Sansho the Bailiff). Set in a barbaric period, authentically recreated, Mizoguchi has transformed the ancient Japanese legend, as told by the novelist Ogai Mori, into a timeless, humanist statement of injustice and suffering. It tells of how the son and daughter of a noble family in feudal Japan are kidnapped and sold as slaves to a tyrannical bailiff. Years later, the son escapes and is reunited with his mother, now blind, crippled and living in abject poverty. Mizoguchi creates an elegaic mood that is unbearably moving without becoming sentimental.
- Cannes, 9 April:
 The jury at this year's Cannes Film Festival, presided over by Jean Cocteau together with Luis Buñuel and André Bazin, has awarded the Grand Prix to the Japanese film Gate of Hell (Jigokumon) in preference to the other strong contender, René Clément's Knave of Hearts. The latter, a British production, was compensated by being given the Special Jury prize, and its leading man Gérard Phillipe took the best actor award. In the role of a young French philanderer in London who confesses all his affairs to his wife, Philipe, alongside British actresses Valerie Hobson, Margaret Johnson and Joan Greenwood, is perfectly cast.
Gate of Hell, the first Japanese movie to use a Western color process (Eastmancolor), remains within the conventions of the Jidai-Geki, or period film, Japan's most popular genre. It tells of a 12th-century warlord who desires a married woman, but when she kills herself rather than submit to him, he is filled with remorse and becomes a monk. The film makes a strong visual impact, as much for its camerawork and color as for its elaborate costumes, and has managed to reproduce the pictorial qualities of traditional Japanese art. Machiko Kyo gives an impressive portrayal of the ideal Japanese wife, beautifully conveying the reserves of courage and passion behind an exterior of calm submissiveness, and Kazuo Hasegawa suggests a disturbing, menacing quality as the warlord. Director Teinosuke Kinugasa, a former child actor and leading oyama (female impersonator) studied briefly with Eisenstein.
 - Hollywood, 15 April: Some critics have suggested that Elia Kazan's latest picture On the Waterfront reflects his role as a "friendly" witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, where he admitted past membership in the Communist Party and named names. The movie, written by Budd Schulberg, who had a similar experience, is a clear parable of loyalty and betrayal. Kazan's film is not the first work to be inspired by the recent McCarthy period. It is the story of a dockworker (Marlon Brando), who denounces the corrupt and all-powerful labor boss (Lee J. Cobb) to the police. Thus, he is considered an informer and has to suffer the consequences. On the Waterfront is not the first work to be inspired by the McCarthy period. Last year, Broadway saw The Crucible from Kazan's long-time friend and theatrical collaborator Arthur Miller, an allegory about a man who refuses to give in to a witch-hunting tribunal. Here putting aside the political analogies, Kazan brings to the screen a brilliantly directed, written and performed production, shot entirely on location in Hoboken, NJ. Brando is superb as the uneducated, inarticulate, confused ex-boxer Terry Malloy, and he gets sterling support from such Actors Studio alumni as Rod Steiger and Karl Malden. Sam Spiegel is the daring producer who took on the production after it was turned down by every major Hollywood studio.
- New York, 2 May: The New York Times today has published a letter from Robert Bresson protesting against the cuts made by the American distributor of his film Diary of a Country Priest, which, in his view, render the film incomprehensible. According to the paper the slow pace of certain foreign films is alien to American taste.
- Hollywood, 28 May: Dial M for Murder, Alfred Hitchcock's last film for Warner Bros., is released today in a "flat" version although it was filmed in 3-D. Is the vogue for stereoscopic films over?
 - New York, 19 June: Release of Them! from Warner Bros., a thriller with a sci-fi/Atomic Age twist. The nightmare begins when two cops, patrolling the lonely desert of New Mexico, come across a catatonic little girl and an empty, mangled trailer. For one of the investigating officers, Sergeant Ben Peterson (James Whitmore), it's the first sign that something is terribly amiss in the world. G-man Robert Graham (James Arness) is called in to offer his expertise, but it's a pair of Department of Agriculture entomologists, Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and his comely daughter Pat (Joan Weldon), who finger the culprits: ants mutated by the power of radiation from nearby nuclear testing. Dr. Medford warns that if the colony isn't quickly contained, mankind could be wiped out within the year. The race is on, stretching from Texas to the sewers of Los Angeles to contain the critters before they can lay waste to the planet.
Them!'s ants don't exactly inspire awe. They are lumbering, slow with limited expression and movement. What's most impressive about them is their scale. They don't quite grow to the size where they could completely reverse their relationship with people and blindly trod the wee humans underfoot, but when Peterson takes one on late in the movie, the gargantuan insect dwarfs him. And their enormity, in the end, works against them -- and not because it makes them easier to spot. But that colossal sweet tooth -- who else is going to steal 40 tons of sugar from a railway car? But whether the ants are truly frightening is not the point. It is the implication of their existence that is so scary. Them! adds the specter of unintended consequences to the already absurd and suicidal nuclear arms race. Mess with nature and it bites back. It's a lesson that's relatively new, less than 10 years after the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And while those events graphically illustrated the effects of what the A-bomb could do to its targets, the consequence of production and testing is still a wild card. Them! theorizes a side effect, however remote, and it strikes a chord with movie audiences who are just now familiarizing themselves with fallout shelters and duck-and-cover air-raid drills. And the success of the movie promises to make an impression on filmmakers who will undoubtedly produce a series of knock-offs in the coming years.
- Los Angeles, 21 July:
 A good-for-nothing layabout causes an attractive woman's blindness in an accident. Stricken with remorse, he sets about becoming an eye surgeon and restores her sight, winning the Nobel Prize in the process. The magnificent hokum of Magnificent Obsession was successfully filmed in 1935 with Robert Taylor and Irene Dunne. Here, handsome hunk Rock Hudson, who until now attracted little attention, makes a maximum impact opposite Jane Wyman and a high-octane supporting cast. Director Douglas Sirk delivers a calculatedly overblown tearjerker with no melodramatic punches pulled and made with consummate and effective professionalism.
 - New York, 4 August: Hitchcock's recently opened Rear Window is a highly original nail-biter. James Stewart plays a news photographer confined to his apartment with a broken leg. What he sees in the apartment across the court as he watches through his rear window, and what he does about it, makes a gripping movie. Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Cameron Mitchell and Raymond Burr support.
- New York, 5 August:
 The opening of A Star Is Born today must surely represent a landmark in the screen musical, and in the troubled career of its star, Judy Garland. The film is a musical remake of the 1937 drama of the same name that starred Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. That was loosely based on the 1932 What Price Hollywood, directed by George Cukor. Once again, Cukor is at the helm, and with the help of a magnificent score -- songs by Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart plus a host of others -- and, especially, his leading lady, he has brought in a memorable film. The tried and trusted tale is of Esther Blodgett, an aspiring young singer who reaches the upper echelons of success as Vicky Lester, only to have her heart broken by her film-star husband Norman Maine, who descends into alcoholism. It's a strong story well told, and British actor James Mason as Maine -- a role turned down by Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart -- is superb. But the film is Garland's triumph. It is almost impossible to single out the high spots, there being so many, but the lengthy "Born in a Trunk" routine, written by Leonard Gershe, impresses, and she reveals the full range of her vocal and interpretive powers in "The Man That Got Away," done in one long tracking shot. Granted that a running time of 154 minutes is not inconsiderable, it is nonetheless sad to note that studio chief Jack L. Warner demanded the removal of almost half-an-hour of film, that included two new numbers specially written by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin.
 - Venice, 7 September:
 There was only one name on people's lips at this year's Venice Film Festival: Guilietta Masina. In La Strada, directed by her husband Federico Fellini, Masina plays Gelsomina, a simple-minded girl who is "bought" from her poor family for a few lira by Zampano (Anthony Quinn), a whoring, drunken, itinerant strongman. He puts her to work as a clown and ignores her, even though she loves him. When Zampano fights and kills Il Matto (Richard Basehart), the tightrope walker who befriended her, Gelsomina dies of a broken heart. After she's dead, Zampano realizes his need for her. Fellini, having given Masina her first starring role, uses her waif-like persona to perfection. But the director had problems convincing producers to accept her, as they thought her too old at 33. However, there is something ageless about the funny, touching and vulnerable character of this female clown, described by most critics here, not unjustly, as Chaplinesque. Surprisingly, the Festival jury chose not to award a prize to an actress this year, despite Mesina's performance, and those of Barbara Stanwyck, Alida Valli and Jeanne Moreau. Instead, they handed the Volpi Cup for best actor to Jean Gabin for his appearance in Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (Honor Among Thieves). The Golden Lion was awarded to Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet. La Strada received a Silver Lion.
- Hollywood, 20 September:
 Walt Disney has terminated his distribution agreement with RKO. All his films will in future be distributed by his own subsidiary, Buena Vista.
 - Hollywood, 29 September: With The Barefoot Contessa, Joseph L. Mankiewicz has directed one of his most personal films. Ava Gardner is Maria d'Amato, née Maria Vargas, who becomes a Hollywood star. The story begins at the star's funeral in the rain. Beside the grave stands Humphrey Bogart, the world-weary director who discovered her some years before. The flashback, ironically narrated by Bogart, tells of her rise to fame, her love affairs and her marriage to aristocrat Rossano Brazzi, who turns out to be impotent. Gardner's physical attributes are well on display, especially when she kicks off her shoes, lifts her skirt and dances with the gypsies, thus meriting the description of her in the publicity slogan accompanying the film: "The World's Most Exciting Animal." Unfortunately, Gardner's acting range is more exposed than her body. Some of the characters in Mankiewicz's cynical and witty screenplay were based on real-life people -- Rita Hayworth, Howard Hughes, Aly Khan -- although the threat of libel resulted in certain cuts in the dialogue. Most people in the industry would recognize Edmond O'Brien's sweating, ruthless press agent as an amalgam of such types. For his first picture in color, Mankiewicz filmed on location in Spain, Italy and on the French Riviera, photographed elegantly by Jack Cardiff.
- Stockholm, 4 October: Premier of Ingmar Bergman's film En Lektion i kärlek (Lesson in Love), which co-stars Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand. The work is one of Bergman's rare excursions into comedy.
- Los Angeles, 5 October: Premier of Otto Preminger's film Carmen Jones, inspired by Bizet's opera and retaining its score with a new libretto. The press revealed that the composer's heirs refuse to allow the film to be shown in France.
- New York, 14 October:
 Paramount has a palpable hit on its hands with White Christmas. Smoothly directed by Michael Curtiz, it's perfect family fare with a score by Irving Berlin and a cast list headed by Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. In the first movie to be filmed in VistaVision, the wide-screen process adopted by Paramount, Danny and Bing play song-and-dance men who save their wartime commander Dean Jagger's ski resort hotel from bankruptcy by putting on the inevitable show. Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen provide the love interest. Kaye and Crosby supply one of the film's highlights by improvising a cute lip-synch version of the girls' song "Sisters."
- Paris, 14 November: Two French stars, Stéphane Audran and Jean-Louis Trintignant, were married today.
- Tokyo, 23 November: Opening of Kenji Mizoguchi's film Chikamatsu Monogatari (The Crucified Lovers). Set in 17th-centure Japan, the word is that it is one of the great director's best films.
- Hollywood, 30 November: The Screen Actors Guild has sent a letter to the Immigration Bureau urging a "stricter application," by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, of regulations governing "alien actors coming into this country to take supporting or even minor roles in movies being made here." The letter stressed that the protest was aimed at "non-resident aliens" who are employed for lower salaries than American actors and not at "stars of distinguished merit and ability."
 - Rome, 1 December: When Luchino Visconti's Senso was shown at the Venice Film Festival last September, it was given a chilly reception. Perhaps the director had disappointed those who thought of him as the instigator of the Italian neo-realist cinema. But Senso could not be further from that movement. Working through the conventions of Italian grand opera -- the film opens sumptuously at the opera house during a performance of Verdi's Il Trovatore -- Visconti has created a lush, melodramatic historical romance. The story is situated in Venice in 1866, where a married Italian noblewoman (Alida Valli), working for the cause of independence, falls in love with an Austrian officer (Farley Granger) in the army of occupation. But she denounces him for desertion after he has been unfaithful to her. The theme of the film is proclaimed from the beginning when the operatic chorus chants All'armi, all'armi (to arms, to arms), and the Italians in the audience take up the chant and unfurl the Italian flag to the alarm of the Austrian officers. Director Visconti has counterimposed rebellion and romance, though the motives of the proud patriots seem as dubious as those of the selfishly lustful. The period of the Risorgimento has seldom been more stunningly recaptured, this being principally due to the color photography by Aldo Graziata (credited as G. R. Aldo) and Robert Krasker. (Sadly, Graziata died in a car crash during shooting.)
- Hollywood, 1 December: Yesterday, Darryl F. Zanuck, the production chief at 20th Century-Fox, declared that the attitude of foreign exhibitors and producers to his company's wide-screen process was one of "eagerness and entusiasm." To substantiate his claim he cited increases in receipts of over 50 percent in all British theaters showing CinemaScope films with similar figures from France. So far orders for CinemaScope photographic lenses have come from West Germany, Italy, England and France.
- New York, 26 December: Release of Vera Cruz, directed by Robert Aldrich and the first film made in Superscope, a process akin to CinemaScope. Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper head the cast.
- New York, 28 December: The New York Critics have voted Marlon Brando best actor for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, and Grace Kelly best actress for George Cukor's The Country Girl.
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6 January - Ryde, Isle of Wight, England,