- New York, 6 January: Prince Ranier of Monaco and actress Grace Kelly have officially announced their engagement.
- Tokyo, 21 January:
 The new film by Kon Ichikawa, Biruma no tategoto (The Burmese Harp), is one of the first Japanese films concerned with pacifist themes related to the defeat of Japan in 1945. Scripted by Nato Wada, the director's wife, it tells of a young soldier-musician in Burma at the time of the Japanese capitulation, who takes on the role of a Buddhist priest and tries to bury as many bodies as he can. Ichikawa, who has stated that he has attempted to explore what he terms "the pain of the age," has created here a non-naturalistic odyssey in visionary black-and-white images, throbbing with the anguish that war brings. To the director, however, the idea of the unbreakable community of the past, present and future, holds more importance than a realistic reportage on a specific war.
- Hollywood, 4 February: The studios are closed today, Saturday, for the first time; the unions have won a five-day work week.
 - Los Angeles, 1 February: Danny Kaye's latest film, The Court Jester, is a return to his best hilarious form. The Robin Hoodish plot shows Kaye accidentally becoming a jester at the English court of the wicked king, played with sneering relish by Basil Rathbone. The film allows the comedian time to romance Glynis Johns, and to exploit his way with tongue-twisting words. The best comic moment comes when, as a reluctant participant in a joust, he is provided with knockout drops for his antagonist, but must remember in which cup they have been put. Thus the mnemonic: "The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true." Norman Panama and Melvin Frank take equal credit for the direction and screenplay.
- Washington, DC, 6 February: French inventor Professor Henri Chrétien who developed Hypergonar from which CinemaScope is derived, has died.
- Los Angeles, 29 February:
 Aliens take possession of human bodies in Don Siegel's The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The inhabitants of a sleepy California town are remorselessly replaced by automaton-like simulacra hatched from enormous seed pods. Local doctor Kevin McCarthy is powerless to halt the march of the "pod people." In one gruesome sequence he takes a pitchfork to an oozing pod as it is about to give birth to the image that will replace him. There's no happy ending here. McCarthy's girlfriend Dana Wynter is possessed by the alien intelligence and pods are dispatched all over America. As the film ends, he stumbles along the freeway yelling "You're next!" to the faceless drivers who flash past him. Critics are divided about the film's message. Is it a metaphor for an "enemy within," and if so, who is the enemy? Communist witch-hunters like Senator McCarthy, as some suggest, or Communists themselves, as others argue?
- Tokyo, 18 March: Kenji Mizoguchi, although seriously ill, is determined to be present at the press showing of his latest film Akasen chitai (Streen of Shame).
- Nice, 21 March: The screening of Grace Kelly's penultimate film, The Swan, has been canceled. Kelly's films have been banned in Monaco since her marriage, and Nice's cinema owners do not wish to offend their royal neighbor, Prince Ranier.
 - Hollywood, 22 March: The Italian actress Anna Magnani was asleep in her apartment in Rome when she was woken up with the news that she had won the Best Actress Oscar® for her first American film, The Rose Tattoo. "If this is a joke," she shrieked over the telephone, "I will get up and kill you whoever you are." Magnani in no way conforms to the conventional conception of a movie star, being rather plump, short in stature, unkempt in appearance and having dark circles under her eyes. But she is able to express earthy, temperamental Mediterranean sensuality better than most Latin performers. In The Rose Tattoo, based on tenneTennessee Williams' play, she is perfect as a widowed housewife tempted into a love affair with a truck driver (Burt Lancaster). Even less typical of a star is Best Actor winner Ernest Borgnine for Marty. The former movie heavy was sympathetically cast as an ugly 34-year-old butcher from the Bronx, who forges a relationship with a plain schoolteacher. Marty, which has brought a new naturalism into Hollywood movies, was also honored with Best Picture, Best Director (Delbert Mann), and Best Screenplay (Paddy Chayefsky). Grace Kelly, who presented the statuette to Borgnine, had just announced her engagement to Prince Ranier of Monaco. She was offered best wishes from the film community by Jerry Lewis, the evening's M.C. Another curiosity was that James Dean, who was killed in a car crash six months ago, became the first actor to receive a posthumous nomination since Jeanne Eagels in 1930. Jo Van Fleet was the Best Supporting Actress for her role as Dean's mother in East of Eden, and up-and-coming actor Jack Lemmon was the Best Supporting Actor for Mister Roberts.
- Mexico, 26 March: Luis Buñuel is filming Evil Eden, a Franco-Mexican co-production with Simone Signoret, Georges Marchal, Charles Vanel and Michel Piccoli. It renews Buñuel 's recent links with the French cinema, recalling his beginnings as a filmmaker in France almost 30 years age.
- Hollywood, 12 April: Filming of Bus Stop has been halted by Marilyn Monroe's hospitalization for "exhaustion due to overwork..., and acute bronchitis."
- Paris, 14 April: The American producer Otto Preminger is here for a meeting with Françoise Sagan, author of Bonjour tristesse. He wants to turn the bestselling novel into a film and is also searching for the ideal actress to play the lead.
- Monaco, 19 April:
 A week ago, Grace Kelly, accompanied by her parents, arrived in the principality aboard the liner Constitution. She was greeted with showers of red and white carnations dropped from a seaplane owned by Aristotle Onassis. For the last seven days, Kelly as been preparing for her wedding while over 2,000 journalists have descended on Monaco. Today, in front of an assembly of European royalty, presidents, and stars of stage and screen, Grace married Prince Ranier in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. It was a wedding worthy of the hoary old description "fairy tale," and in the process Kelly made the transition from the queen of MGM lot to real-life princess.
- Hollywood, 10 May: Harry Warner and his brother Albert are selling their holdings in the Warner Bros. studio to a group of investors headed by the First National Bank of Boston. Jack Warner is holding on to his, however, and remains the largest individual shareholder in the company.
 - Cannes, 11 May: An exceptional event has taken place at this year's Cannes Film Festival -- the two major prizes have been awarded for the first time ever to documentaries. The jury rather audaciously has decided to honor Jacques-Yves Cousteau's Le Monde du silence (The Silent World) with the Golden Palm, and Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Mystère Picasso (The Picasso Mystery) with the Special Jury Prize. The former is a genuine odyssey of exploration of the fauna and flora of the ocean's depths by the famous French oceanographer, diver and documentary filmmaker. With his co-director, the 24-year-old Louis Malle, and two other underwater cameramen, Cousteau was able to observe the submarine life of the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Thanks to technically sophisticated equipment that includes aqua lungs and underwater scooters, the team, operating from Cousteau's vessel Calypso, has made it possible for audiences to enter an unknown world of striking beauty.
 The Picasso Mystery introduces us to a no less fascinating world, that of artistic creation. Clouzot filmed the 75-year-old modern master at work, using special transparent canvases so that the act of painting could be shot from behind. When Picasso works in charcoal or ink, the film is in black and white, but from the moment he takes up his paints, it bursts into color. And a standing ovation was given to the delightful 36-minute fantasy Le Ballon rouge (The Red Balloon), shown out of competition.
 - Los Angeles, 13 May: Montgomery Clift, who was in the midst of filming Raintree County, has had a serious car accident after leaving a party at the home of his friend and co-star Elizabeth Taylor. He was at the wheel when he suddenly lost control of the steering and ran straight into a tree. In the near-fatal crash Clift, aged 35, lost four teeth, broke his nose, fractured his jaw and suffered a huge cut from his nose through his upper lip. His facial muscles have been seriously damaged. The accident was the culmination of a troubled period for Clift. On location for Raintree County he was twice found walking around at night stark naked and is also said to have taken an overdose of sleeping pills.
- New York, 16 May: Alfred Hitchcock proves his ongoing mastery of the thriller genre with his American remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Hitchcock made the film in England in 1934. This time the action is transposed from Switzerland to Morocco but none of the suspense is lost. James Stewart, who worked for Hitch in both Rope and Rear Window, co-stars with Doris Day.
- New Delhi, 19 May: The Indian Government has banned six American and two British films for presenting a "disparaging" impression of life in Africa. Last year, after a demonstration by African students over the Universal production Tanganyika, Prime Minister Nehru made an informal recommendation that the censors ban films depicting Africa as part of "the white man's burden." The African Queen and Mogambo have been banned.
- Chicago, 22 May:
 The limitless vistas of Utah's Monument Valley play an integral part in John Ford's superb new Western, The Searchers. Here, landscape is movingly related to theme as John Wayne conducts a relentless search over several years for a niece captured by Indians. In the role of the embittered ex-Confederate Ethan Edwards, Wayne gives his finest performance, playing a stubborn man heartrendingly excluded at the last from family reunion and left as a lonely, romantic figure facing the majestic landscape of the West.
 - New York, 23 May: Who says the B-movie is dead? Moviegoers paying to see Robert Mitchum sleepwalking through Foreign Intrigue will get their money's worth from the supporting feature, The Killing, a crackling thriller directed by newcomer Stanley Kubrick. Based on Lionel White's book Clean Break, and scripted by both Kubrick and pulp writer Jim Thompson, The Killing stars Sterling Hayden as an ex-con who sets up a meticulously planned racetrack heist. The operation is seen from the viewpoint of the participants: twitchy little racetrack cashier Elisha Cook Jr., reformed alcoholic Jay C. Flippen, crooked cop Ted de Corsia, bartender Joe Sawyer, wrestler Kola Kwarlan and ultra-cool crippled gunman Timothy Carey. Everything goes like clockwork, but the gang is betrayed by Cook's wife, Marie Windsor at her flooziest, who blows the whistle on them to her gangster boyfriend Vince Edwards. Although the picture's Dragnet-style commentary palls very quickly, its sure pace and strong ensemble playing signal the arrival of an interesting new director. The 29-year-old Kubrick is a former photographer who made his feature film debut in 1953 with the cheapie Fear and Desire, financed by family and friends.
- Hollywood, 28 June:
 Yul Brynner repeats his smash-hit Broadway performance as the irascible King of Siam in Fox's lavish silver screen version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I, that has been loosely based on a 1946 non-musical picture, Anna and the King of Siam. Brynner's Broadway co-star, the late Gertude Lawrence, is replaced here by Deborah Kerr, who whistles a happy tune as the resourceful governess of his unruly children. Kerr's vocals are dubbed by Marni Nixon, but her warm performance provides a perfect foil to the dominating style of the bald, brooding Brynner.
- Paris, 1 July: At the announcement of the results of the Concours de Conservatoire, Jean-Paul Belmondo, who only received an honorable mention, was triumphantly carried shoulder-high by his friends who were disgusted by the list of winners. He gave a mocking salute in passing to the jury of this venerable institution.
- Nice, 4 July: Gary Cooper is reported to have met Pablo Picasso while out for a walk and to have asked him for his autograph.
 - New York, 5 July: The stuttering career of Paul Newman, hailed a couple of years ago as the "new Brando," has been given a shot in the arm by MGM's new Somebody Up There Likes Me, the story of one of New York's favorite sons, Rocky Graziano. The film's director, Robert Wise, persuaded Metro to cast Newman as the slum kid who becomes middleweight champion of the world, and the result looks like it will make a star of Newman, who is still trying to live down his 1954 movie debut in Warners' clodhopping Biblical epic, The Silver Chalice, in which he was cast as the Greek craftsman who made the vessel of the title for Saint Luke. Somebody up there likes Paul Newman.
- London, 14 July:
 A crowd of 3,000 fans gathered to greet Marilyn Monroe today when she arrived in London. She was accompanied by her husband, the dramatist Arthur Miller, whom she married just nine days ago in White Plains, NY. None of Monroe's family or friends attended the ceremony, which was conducted by a rabbi. The news of the marriage was only made public several hours after the wedding. The couple have come to London for the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl in which Monroe will co-star with Laurence Olivier. In 1953 Olivier starred in the stage version of this story with his wife Vivien Leigh. Now he has adapted it for the screen. Monroe, who is determined to establish herself as a serious actress, has set much store in this new film, and has brought with her, as dialogue coach, Paula Strasberg, wife of the founder of the Actors Studio, Lee Strasberg.
- London, 18 August: Vivien Leigh has had a nervous breakdown, following a miscarriage.
 - New York, 21 August: Veteran director King Vidor's War and Peace opens today. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and shot on location in Italy at a cost of $6 million, it weighs in at 208 minutes. The money has certainly been well spent on the battle scenes, notably Napoléon's retreat from Moscow, which are epic, authentic and visually spectacular. But the film's sprawling narrative fails to gel. The intimate scenes lack bite, and a motley conglomeration of accents from a multi-national cast (including Vittorio Gassman, John Mills and Anita Ekberg) strains credibility. Audiences, however, will be delighted to see Audrey Hepburn again in only her third movie since Roman Holiday. Playing Tolstoy's heroine Natasha, the ravishing Miss Hepburn is perfectly cast and, with her blend of innocence, vulnerability and inner strength, manages to overcome the limp screenplay (which required the input of nine writers), a miscast and too-old Henry Fonda as Pierre Bezukhov, and a wooden Prince Andrei from her real-life husband, Mel Ferrer.
- Kyoto, 24 August:
 The great Japanese film director Kenji Mizoguchi, best known for Ugetsu monogatari (1953), has just died of leukemia at the age of 58. Coming from a lower class family Mizoguchi entered the production company Nikkatsu as an actor and specialized in female roles. Later he became an assistant director and made his first film in 1922. Out of his 86 films, only about a dozen have been seen in the West, though these have been enough to establish him as a master. Despite being forced to make many films in which he had little interest, Mizoguchi gradually developed his own style and subject matter. His humanist view of the brutality of feudal Japan focuses mainly on the sufferings of women, as seen in his undisputed masterpieces, Saikaku ichidai onna (The Life of O-Haru) (1952) and Sanshô dayû (Sansho the Bailiff) (1954).
- London, 5 September: Theater managers called for police protection today to control teenage audiences during showing of an American "rock 'n' roll" movie titled Rock Around the Clock. Seven "Teddy boys" have been fined for rioting in a theater showing the film. According to them, the music "sent them up the wall."
 - Paris, 12 September: Ever since meeting Ingrid Bergman in Hollywood in the early 1940s, Jean Renoir wanted to made a film with her. He initially proposed a movie called Sarn, adapted from Mary Webb's novel Precious Bone, but producer David O. Selznick rejected it because the heroine has a harelip, an unthinkable impediment to impose on a glamorous film star. Selznick, however, wanted to make Joan of Arc with the Swedish actress and offered it to Renoir, who refused because of memories of Carl Theodor Dreyer's masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc. Over a decade later, Renoir and Bergman have finally gotten together for a delightful period piece called Eléna et les hommes (Paris Does Strange Things), filmed simultaneously in both French and English. In the Paris of the 1880s, Princes Eléna Sorokovska (Bergman), a merry but impoverished Polish widow, agrees to marry Martin-Michaud (Pierre Bertin), an elderly but wealthy boot magnate, for money. Meanwhile, she has attracted the attentions of General Rollan (Jean Marais) and Henri de Chevincourt (Mel Ferrer), an aristocratic dilettante. At the end, she finally chooses Henri (love) over Martin-Michaud (money) and General Rollan (power). The director has said that he chose this operetta-like comedy because he wanted to see Ingrid Bergman smile again on screen. She has seldom been more ravishing and beguiling, setting a joyous tone as she flits from one man to another.
- New York, 17 September:
 The tormented life of the painter Vincent Van Gogh, from his days in the coal-mining region of Belgium to his suicide at Auvers-sur-Oise, is the subject of a splendid new film by Vincente Minnelli called Lust for Life. Before shooting started, the director had several battles with the MGM front office. He won his fight to shoot in actual European locations, and to substitute Ansco color for Eastman color, which would better capture the paintings, but he had to accept CinemaScope, a shape unsuitable to fully represent Van Gogh's work on screen. The physical likeness of Kirk Douglas to Van Gogh is hallucinatory, and his performance is full of passionate intensity, as is that of Anthony Quinn as fellow-artist Paul Gauguin.
- Hollywood, 20 September: Michael Wilson has not received screenplay credits on the release prints of William Wyler's Friendly Persuasion. Allied Artists, who are distributing the film, have evoked the Screen Writers Guild's amended clause to contracts with studios. The clause allows studios to deny credits to any writer revealed to be a member of the Communist Party or refusing to give evidence before the HUAC. Wilson refused to testify to the HUAC in 1951.
- Los Angeles, 5 October: Opening here of Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments, which stars Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson and Yvonne De Carlo.
 - New York, 18 October:
 Depending on your point of view, Mike Todd, former carnival barker and producer of Broadway spectaculars, is a master-showman, gambler, promoter or con-man supreme. Now he has ventured into film with an extravagant screen version of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. David Niven stars here as Phileas Fogg, archetypal English clubman, who wagers that he can span the globe in the time specified by the title. Accompanied by his valet, played by the Mexican bullring comedian Cantinflas, he sets off, pursued by Robert Newton's Inspector Fix. Along the way, he rescues shirley maclaine's Indian princess from a pyre and meets a host of stars in cameo roles. Among them are Ronald Colman, Noël Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Buster Keaton, Bea Lillie, Peter Lorre, Red Skelton, John Gielgud, George Raft, Fernandel and Juliette Greco. The picture was scripted by S. J. Perelman and directed by Michael Anderson after the original choice, John Farrow, had been fired by the volatile Todd. Production ground to a halt several times as Todd ran out of cash, but the result, shot on locations around the world and on a variety of Hollywood backlots, is a monument to the great showman's chutzpah. Sadly, a few days after filming ended, Robert Newton died.
For more information on the filming and technical aspects of Around the World in 80 Days and Todd-AO, visit the American Widescreen Museum.
- London, 30 October: Marilyn Monroe was among the group of international stars who were presented to Queen Elizabeth II at last night's Royal Command Performance. The Queen is reported to have asked her how she liked living in Windsor, eliciting a nervous "What?" from the star! The film shown was Michael Powell's The Battle of the River Plate.
- Ceylon, 8 November: Peasants fled in terror today as paratroopers descended on a village 12 miles from Ceylon. They set the temple bells ringing to signal the start of an invasion. Police were called to the village to explain that the "invaders" were actors in British director David Lean's new film, The Bridge on the River Kwai.
- New York, 15 November:
 Rock 'n' roll sensation Elvis Presley has made his movie debut in Fox's Love Me Tender. It's a Western in which he gets shot by Neville Brand, although he reappears as a ghost at the end, warbling the title song and strumming his guitar!
- Los Angeles, 23 November: Jayne Mansfield has been served with a writ by her husband, Paul Mansfield. He accuses her of being an unworthy mother on the grounds that she is living with her lover, and has posed nude for Playboy magazine.
 - Paris, 28 November: Roger Vadim has created a scandal with his first film, Et Dieu... créa la femme (And God Created Woman), which stars his young wife, Brigitte Bardot. The ruckus has been caused by the eroticism and nudity in the love scenes, and the amoral nature of the sexy 18-year-old heroine. But Vadim regrets that he could not go as far as he wished, because the censors forced him to cut many sequences. In reply to those who have criticized him for exhibiting his wife in such a manner, Vadim says, "Brigitte loves the nude scenes because she hates hypocrisy. She is a girl of her own time, liberated from all feelings of guilt and free from all taboos imposed by society." The critic François Truffaut defended the film in an article published in the magazine Arts, titled "B. B. is the victim of an intrigue." Apart from the kittenish charms of Bardot, the film reveals the delights of St. Tropez in color and CinemaScope.
- Paris, 11 December:
 Robert Bresson's latest film, Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le Vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped or The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth), recounts the harsh ordeal of Fontaine (brilliantly played by François Leterrier), a French Resistance member arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Montluc. There, he holds on to sanity by meticulously planning every detail of a seemingly impossible escape. When he is condemned to death, he sets about putting that plan into operation. Bresson was inspired by the true-life experiences of André Devigny, who served as technical advisor. The director's austere camera, stripping the action of all but the bare essentials, totally involves the audience in this testament to courage, faith and ingenuity, all the more authentic for the use of non-professional actors.
 - New York, 18 December: The Roman Catholic Church and the National League of Decency have loudly condemned Elia Kazan's latest film Baby Doll, the latter claiming that the movie "dwells amost without variation or relief upon carnal suggestiveness." These protests should most likely assure the picture, written by Tennessee Williams, a huge box-office success. Carroll Baker plays the backward, thumb-sucking virgin child bride of aging cotton mill owner Karl Malden. His is sexually frustrated by her refusal to allow him into her bed, even though it is a child's cot, too small for her ample proportions. Enter virile Sicilian worker Eli Wallach, who seduces her, and you have a combustible triangular situation. The black-and-white photography of Boris Kaufman brilliantly captures the steamy atmosphere of the Mississippi backwoods. Williams' witty and trenchant screenplay and Kazan's graphic direction are as bold as the Production Code will stand. Twenty-five-year-old Baker, dressed in a short and revealing nightgown, has become the newest sensational sex goddess. Born in Pennsylvania in May 1931, the daughter of a traveling salesman, the blonde Carroll Baker left junior college in order to join a dance company. After a brief marriage to a furrier, she set off for Hollywood where she had a bit part in the Esther Williams vehicle Easy to Love (1953). Back in New York, while appearing in TV commercials, she studied at the Actors Studio, where she met her future husband, stage director Jack Garfein. Shortly thereafter, she was cast in several parts in TV dramas and a role in Robert Sherwood's play All Summer Long. When she finally returned to Hollywood for the part of Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson's daughter in Giant, released two months ago, she landed the role of Baby Doll at the same time. As the physically forward virgin, Baker manages simultaneously to express sensuality and innocence. The proceeds from tonight's opening at the Victoria Theater will go to the Actors Studio.
- Italy, 31 December: At the present time, Italy has the largest network of movie houses in the whole of Europe: 17,000. This is the highest number ever reached in the "Old World."
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3 January - Peekskill, NY,