- Cairo, 20 January: Premiere of Youssef Chahine's film Cairo Station in which the director -- playing a simpleton who turns criminal -- also demonstrates that he is an excellent actor.
- Paris, 29 January:
 The recent Louis Delluc Prize-winning film Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Frantic) heralds a new generation of French directors. The 26-year-old Louis Malle had tried for many months to shoot an autobiographical screenplay, but producers refused, thinking he was too young to undertake such a risk. Malle, therefore, decided he would make this thriller, which he has overlaid with a dark atmosphere and psychological depth. Tension is well built up, especially in the crucial scene when the hero is stuck in an elevator. The effective jazz score was improvised by Miles Davis.
- Hollywood, 8 February: Paramount has sold the television rights of its catalogue prior to 1948 (750 films) for a total of $50 million to the Music Corporation of American (MCA). Paramount shares have skyrocketed.
- Hollywood, 21 February: Ma and Pa Kettle have come to the end of their 10-year run. The popular series, starring Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride, had its genesis in The Egg and I (1947). Ma and Pa Kettle followed in 1949, with a film a year until 1957's The Kettles in Old MacDonald's Farm, which, it was decided, would be their last.
- Washington, DC, 3 March: The Supreme Court has returned an unfavorable veridct to the 23 victims of the blacklist who instituted proceedings against the studios that had suspended them; the decision ratifies the suspensions.
- London, 6 March: Simone Signoret has received the British Academy Award for her performance in The Witches of Salem. Raymond Rouleau directed this adaptation of Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible.
- New York, 10 March: At Carnegie Hall, Danny Kaye conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra with his feet! The occasion was a benefit concert.
- Hollywood, 25 March:
 The movie theaters in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles where Mike Todd's Around the World in 80 Days is showing, have closed their doors today as a sign of mourning for the producer. The flamboyant impresario, born Avron Goldbogen in June 1907, was killed three days ago when his private plane, "Lucky Liz," in which he was flying to New York, crashed in a storm near Albuquerque. Elizabeth Taylor had wanted to accompany her husband on his flight but was persuaded to stay at home because of a flu virus. The couple had been married only seven months. On 6 August last year, their daughter Lisa was born by caesarean and both mother and child nearly died. Liz was advised never to have another baby. On hearing the news of Todd's tragic accident, Liz screamed so loudly that neighbors a few doors away could hear her. The star had to be drugged to prevent her taking her own life.
 - Hollywood, 26 March: This years Academy Awards ceremony, the thirtieth, was hosted by Rosalind Russell, James Stewart, Bob Hope, David Niven and Jack Lemmon. The most successful film of the year was The Bridge on the River Kwai, produced by Sam Spiegel, directed by David Lean and starring Alec Guinness, William Holden, Jack Hawkins and Sessue Hayakawa. The film is a monument to the Spiegel method: the meticulous preparation of an ostensibly solemn subject, swathed in handsome production values and with its hint of radicalism kept firmly under control by the tidy impersonality of Lean's direction. Nevertheless, the movie's eschewing of stereotyped heroics, together with its message that was is "madness," has enabled it to carry away seven Oscars®: Best Picture, Director and Actor (Alec Guinness as the tragic Colonel Nicholson), Cinematography (Jack Hildyard), Editing (Peter Taylor), Score (Malcolm Arnold) and Screenplay (Pierre Boulle, who adpated it from his own book). The Best Actress Oscar® went to Joanne Woodward for her gripping performance in The Three Faces of Eve as the young woman afflicted with multiple personalities. Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki were presented with the Best Supporting Actor and Actress Awards for their work in Sayonara. That same film also managed to scoop the Art Direction-Set Decoration Award, while Le Notti de Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria) from Italy's Federico Fellini was voted Best Foreign Film.
- New York, 2 April:
 Ever the chameleon, Marlon Brando has assumed a blond hairstyle for The Young Lions, adapted from Irwin Shaw's novel, in which he plays a wartime Nazi officer who comes to see the error of his ways. He shares the acting honors with Montgomery Clift, cast as a Jew harassed with anti-Semitism by his fellow American soldiers. Their lives, and Brando's death, are intertwined by the war in a powerful film with a stirring score by Hugo Friedhofer.
 - Paris, 4 April: Jacques Becker's latest film Montparnasse 19 (Modigliani of Montparnasse) is dedicated to the memory of Max Ophüls, who died in March last year. Initially, it was meant to be directed by Ophüls, but when the German director was hospitalized with a heart attack, he suggested Becker take over. Becker provoked the ire of the screenwriter Henri Jeanson by making changes to the text, and also had to contend with Modigliani's daughter on the set. Considering the circumstances, this tale of the unfortunate painter has been effectively realized and Gérard Philipe is ideal in the lead role.
- Hollywood, 4 April:
 Troubled star Lana Turner has always protested that "I find men terribly exciting," but she got more than she bargained for when she took former mobster Johnny Stompanato, alias Johnny Valentine, into her bed. Stompanato was no funny Valentine. While Turner was away filming Another Time, Another Place on location in England, he ran up massive gambling debts and, reportedly, sexually abused Turner's unhappy 14-year-old daughter Cheryl Crane. Lana and Johnny's stormy relationship, punctuated by violent physical altercations, reached its bloody climax today. When Stompanato threatened to take a knife to her mother, Crane plunged a nine-inch carving knife into his chest. The police arrived almost immediately, but too late to save Johnny. Cheryl has been arrested but is claiming self-defense. Her grandmother will take care of her while she awaits a juvenile court appearance.
- Los Angeles, 11 April: After having heard evidence from Lana Turner for an hour, an investigating jury exonerated her daughter Cheryl of all charges in the Johnny Stompanato murder case, which they ruled as "justifiable homicide."
- Cannes, 4 May: A furious Sophia Loren has left early from the Festival because the film she stars in, Desire Under the Elms, an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play directed by Delbert Mann, has not been given an evening screening as requested by the star.
- New York, 11 May: Nine months to the day after his marriage to the actress Anna Kashfi, Marlon Brando has become a father. The surprise wedding had taken place at the home of his aunt in California during the shooting of The Young Lions, and, evidently inspired, Brando will call his son Christian Devi, the first name after the character he played in the film. The actor had wanted to get married and have children for a long time.
 - Hollywood, 15 May: While My Fair Lady is still packing them in on Broadway, a scintillating new film musical by the same composers, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, also designed by Cecil Beaton, has opened to acclaim. Produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Vincente Minnelli in the best MGM musical tradition, Gigi is a version of Colette's novel, already adapted as a 1948 French film, and also a Broadway play. The delightful Leslie Caron takes the role of a young girl raised by two old cocottes to be a courtesan in the Paris of 1900. However, when she refuses to be the mistress of Gaston (Louis Jourdan), a bored man-about-town, he proposes marriage. Much of Gigi was actually shot in Paris, the principal sites being the Bois de Boulogne, Maxim's and the Tuileries gardens. The captivating presence of Maurice Chevalier recalls the world of his 1930s Paramount musicals as he sings "I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore" and "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," plus a touching and humorous duet with Hermione Gingold, "I Remember It Well."
- Rome, 20 May: William Wyler has begun filming a new version of Ben-Hur with Charlton Heston in the title role.
- Cannes, 18 May:
 The actress Tatiana Samoilova was chosen by the jury of the Cannes Film Festival as the recipient of a special award for her moving performance in the Soviet film The Cranes Are Flying. Samoilova plays a young hospital worker who hears that her fiance has been killed in the war. She refuses to believe it, yet she marries another man whom she does not love. The actress touched the jury with her beautiful eyes, that bear the look of a hunted animal. They were also impressed by the lyricism of Mikhail Kalatozov's direction, and the sweeping camerawork, and offered the picture the Golden Palm. But if the highest prize went to a story that got audiences weeping, the Special Jury award was a tribute to laughter. It was presented to Mon oncle, Jacques Tati's hilarious satire on the middle-class's obsession with modernity. The film also reintroduced us to the engaging character that Tati created in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr. Hulot's Holiday) five years ago. After The Seventh Seal won the Special Jury prize last year, Ingmar Bergman returned to receive the best director award for Nära livet (Brink of Life). This enclosed drama, set in a maternity ward, has the advantage of three brilliant actresses -- Ingrid Thulin, Eva Dahlbeck and Bibi Andersson -- who earned a collective best actress prize. America's Paul Newman was voted best actor for a powerful performance in The Long Hot Summer, a tale of family intrigue in the deep South.
 - San Francisco, 28 May: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo would have looked like a good commercial proposition to Paramount, but they could hardly have anticipated the strength of the final product. Based on the French novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (whose Les Diaboliques was a big success here), the picture was cast with big box-office stars James Stewart and Kim Novak, and photgraphed in VistaVision at a variety of picturesque locations in and around San Francisco, where it has just opened to acclaim. It is clear that Hitch has accomplished something original and unexpected. The movie is not at all a conventional thriller, but rather a crime drama-cum-black romantic fantasy, and Stewart's ex-police detective is hardly a conventional hero. His is a troubled and obsessive character who falls in love with a young woman half his age. Hired to tail and look after her, he is shattered when she commits suicide. Steward delivers his usual excellent performance, but Novak is a revelation, perfectly cast in the dual role of a cool, sophisticated blonde and a young, sexy and brunette shop girl. Paramount's own VistaVision process has never been more imaginatively or effectively used (photography by Robert Burks), while other key members of the creative team include the composer Bernard Herrmann, Edith Head (costume design) and Saul Bass (titles).
- Brussels, 8 May:
 Orson Welles has made a blistering Hollywood comeback with Touch of Evil, which has won the main prize at the Brussels film festival, but the volatile star has already disowned the picture, claiming that it has been mutilated by Universal. Welles sets a sizzling pace from the film's stunning opening sequence, a marathon crane and tracking shot by cameraman Russell Metty. Thereafter he dominates the film as Hank Quinlan, a crooked cop in a sleazy Texas border town. This monstrous creation, a sweat-sodden, candy bar-gobbling mountain of flesh, tangles with Mexican narcotics agent Charlton Heston over a murder investigation, with Heston's bride Janet Leigh as the pawn in their struggle. An outstanding supporting cast includes Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff and Dennis Weaver, and there are unbilled cameos from Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins and Mercedes McCambridge, the last as a leather-clad harpy wielding a syringe. The film also reunites Welles with Marlene Dietrich, whom he sawed in half 14 years ago in Follow the Boys. And at the end of this film Dietrich's Mexican madam observes that Quinlan was "some kind of a man" as his bloated corpse bobs in the shallows of the Rio Grande. The same could be said of Welles.
- Monaco, 16 June: Frank Sinatra appears in a documentary on Monaco for American television in which he interviews his former co-star, Grace Kelly, now Princess Grace.
 - New York, 3 July: Cast as "a hustler out to make a fast buck" in Paramount's King Creole, Elvis Presley is called upon to give something resembling a dramatic performance. Based on a Harold Robbins novel, A Stone for Danny Fisher, this is a New Orleans-style melodrama in which busboy Elvis sets his sights on the nightclubs of Bourbon Street with the help of ruthless manager Walter Matthau. Veteran director Michael Curtiz skillfully summons up the seedy, sweaty milieu in which Presley rises to stardom, and the Pelvis is given every opportunity to exercise those million-dollar vocal cords.
- Paris, 8 July: According to a recent survey published in France Soir, 63 percent of French men and 59 percent of French women are interested in the cinema; 25 percent prefer romantic films, 20 percent thrillers and 12 percent historical films.
- Hollywood, 9 July: Marilyn Monroe has returned to the movie capital after an absence of two years. She will be filming Some Like It Hot with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, for Billy Wilder.
- London, 9 July: At the premiere of The Vikings, directed by Richard Fleischer, the movie's star Kirk Douglas presented the Duke of Edinburgh with a miniature Viking ship for his son, Prince Charles.
- Rome, 10 July:
 Thanks to the intervention of the Monsignors Floriot in France and Graziadei in Italy -- and the Pope, no less -- the eight-year marriage of Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman has been annulled by the Vatican. Even if they were divorced in the eyes of the world, the couple have remained married in Italy because divorce does not officially exist there. The Swedish actress, a 43-year-old mother of four children, has dreamed of remarriage. She met the Swedish theater producer Lars Schmidt in France when she was shooting Jean Renoir's Paris Does Strange Things two years ago. "I live in Paris with my children, and Roberto seems very satisfied with the arrangement," Bergman explained. "However, he was unaware of Lars' existence. He didn't think there could be anyone else in my life." She will now be able to marry Schmidt, because she is single again at the Pope's bidding.
 - Hollywood, 3 August: Samuel Goldwyn's new production, Porgy and Bess, seems to be the victim of a curse. The Screen Directors Guild has threatened to boycott the picture unless the director Rouben Mamoulian, whom Goldwyn fired a week ago, is reinstated. Mamoulian, who directed the first production of the George Gershwin opera on Broadway in 1935, had appealed to the Guild. Meanwhile, the producer has replaced Mamoulian with Otto Preminger. (Fourteen years ago, Preminger replaced Mamoulian on Laura.) This event follows a month after a huge fire destroyed many of the sets for the film.
- Venice, 1 September: The number of films in competition at the Venice Film Festival has been steadily decreasing throughout the decade. For the third year in a row, only 14 films (representing 10 countries) have been entered. This is a marked contrast to the 31 films competing in 1952 and 1953, 29 in 1954 and 31 again in 1955.
- Moscow, 1 September: The second part of Eisenstein's Ivan Groznyy (Ivan the Terrible), the first part of which has been banned since 1946, is finally being shown.
- Venice, 2 September: The arrival of Brigitte Bardot on the banks of the lagoon here provoked a virtual riot. She was accompanied by Sacha Distel.
- Venice, 8 September:
 The Venice Film Festival is in the habit of discovering new talent, and this year is no exception. Of the three directors whose films gained the top prizes, 35-year-old Italian Francesco Rosi is the least known. His first feature, La Sfida (The Challenge), is a corrosive condemnation of the Mafia. That picture shared the Silver Lion with Louis Malle's L'Amants (The Lovers), the latter being a brave choice by the jury because of the scandal the film has caused in Italy and France. Perhaps L'Amants has offended certain people because it equates love with adultery -- surely pardonable when the temptress is Jeanne Moreau. The winner of the Golden Lion was Hiroshi Inagaki's Muhomatsu no issho (The Life of Matsu the Untamed), a remake of a 1943 Japanese picture that shows, with great passion, the differences between the social classes in Japan. Sophia Loren and Alec Guinness received the acting awards for Desire Under the Elms and The Horse's Mouth, respectively.
- New York, 10 September: A chemical manufacturing company has announced the forthcoming completion of an Anglo-American project, endowed with a $3 million budget, that aims to bring a new dimension to the movies -- smell!
- Washington, DC, 17 September: Alfred Hitchcock has been given permission to use models of the faces on Mount Rushmore, which are protected by copyright, for scenes in North by Northwest.
 - Paris, 17 September: A controversial rendezvous between veteran star Jean Gabin and current sensation Brigitte Bardot has been arranged in Claude Autant-Lara's En cas de malheur (Love Is My Profession). Gabin might have had his doubts about playing a middle-aged lawyer who falls for Bardot, whom he is defending on a charge of theft. But after a long delay he was persuaded to take on the role by Edwige Feuillére, cast as his wife in the film. He was also reassured by the fact that the screenplay is adapted from a novel by Georges Simenon, of whom Gabin is an unqualified admirer. In spite of its racy English title, Love Is My Profession is a solid melodrama, an intriguing collision of generations and attitudes, in which Gabin amusedly contemplates Bardot's sumptuous body while casually walking away with the acting honors.
- Hollywood, 18 September:
 Tennessee Williams' intense family drama, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Richard Brooks, stars Paul Newman as Brick and Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie, the wife he refuses to sleep with. With Burl Ives reprising his stage performance as Big Daddy, the cast is impressive, although the movie is somewhat sanitized. Taylor, however, is a revelation, demonstrating her personal courage as well as talent. Filming commenced very shortly after her husband Mike Todd was killed, and though grief-stricken, she reported for work to deliver a stunning performance, moving from seductive Southern kitten to tigerish cat in her rage and frustration.
- Paris, 29 September: The critic François Truffaut, encouraged by the welcome given to his first short film, is going to make a feature, Les Quatre cent coups (The Four Hundred Blows). He is looking for a boy of about 12 for the leading role.
 - Warsaw, 3 October: More mature and ironic than A Generation and Kanal, the first two parts of Andrzej Wajda's war trilogy, Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds) brings it to a stunning climax. The action takes place on the last day of the war in 1945, when the youngest member of a Nationalist underground movement in a provincial Polish town is ordered to kill the new Communist district secretary. As he waits in a hotel during the night, he meets and falls in love with a girl and learns that there is more to life than killing. The brilliant young actor Zbigniew Cybulski creates a complex characterization of the protagonist that embodies the skeptical new generation now in Poland.
- Paris, 10 October:
 Marcel Carné's new film, Les Tricheurs (Youthful Sinners), seems set to be the box-office success of the season. Without a single star in the cast, the film concerns existential youth in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Included among them is a middle-class student (Jacques Charrier), who falls in live with a girl (Pascale Petit) among the young crowd dedicated to defying social and moral conventions. Unfortunately, blackmail, infidelity and group pressure sabotage the relationship. Apart from the fresh young cast, one of the major interests of the film is the jazz score that includes recordings by Stan Getz, Roy Eldridge, Oscar Peterson and Dizzy Gillespie.
- Brussels, 12 October: On the occasion of the Brussels World's Fair, the Belgian Cinémathèque organized a poll of the best films of all time. The 12 top pictures were, in order --
- Eisenstein's Bronenosets Potyomkin (The Battleship Potemkin) (100 votes)
- Chaplin's The Gold Rush (85)
- De Sica's Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) (85)
- Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) (78)
- Renoir's La Grand illusion (72)
- Stroheim's Greed (61)
- Griffith's Intolerance (61)
- Pudovkin's Mat (Mother) (54)
- Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (50)
- Dovzhenko's Zemlya (Earth) (47)
- Murnau's Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) (45)
- Weine's Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) (43)
The selection was made by a jury of 117 film historians from 26 countries, among them John Grierson, Iris Barry, André Bazin and Henri Langlois. It is significant that the list includes only three sound films almost 30 years after talkies came in. By combining the number of votes obtained by each director for all of the films mentioned in the ballot, Chaplin easily topped the list.
- Paris, 5 November:
 François Truffaut has called Louis Malle's Les Amants (The Lovers) "the first night of love in the cinema," and Malle was awarded a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival two months ago. The Parisian public is now able to judge for themselves. The heroine is a young provincial middle-class wife (Jeanne Moreau), bored with her lover as well as her husband. She then meets an archeology student (Jean-Marc Bory), with whom she spends a night of erotic bliss at her country house, before they leave together at dawn. Many have found the boldness of the semi-nude love scenes shocking, but rarely in the cinema has the act of love been shown with such purity. This is not the opinion of the Catholic Church, who have commented that "Christian duty demands that the film should be avoided."
 - Paris, 11 November: André Bazin, the French critic and theorist, has died of leukemia at the age of 40. His illness had limited his activites during the last few years, but he continued to be seen once a week at Cahiers du Cinéma, the influential magazine he co-founded in 1951. A student of the Catholic philosopher Emmanuel Mournier, and follower of the critic and director Roger Leenhardt, Bazin was undoubtedly the greatest film critic of his generation. During the Occupation, he formed a ciné club where politically banned movies were shown in defiance of the German authorities. As editor of Cahiers, Bazin gradually formulated a theory of cinema in opposition to Eisenstein's theory of montage. Among the directors who satisfied his criterion of "objective reality" were Dreyer, Stroheim, Welles, Wyler and Renoir.
- Madrid, 15 November:
 While filming a swordfight with George Sanders for Solomon and Sheba, Tyrone Power suffered a massive heart attack. He was rushed to the hospital but died an hour later without regaining consciousness. Born in Cincinnati in 1913, he was the son of matinee idol Tyrone Power Sr., and there was never any doubt about the career he should follow. After early work on stage and radio, he followed his father to Hollywood, and when Power Sr. died in 1931, the son was given a bit part, his first, in Tom Brown of Culver. After another stint on the stage, he was signed by Fox in 1936, and remained under contract to that studio for most of his career. His first two wives were Annabella and Linda Christian, who bore him two sons. He had recently gotten married to Debbie Smith Minardos. The filming of Solomon and Sheba, a hopeful return to the swashbuckling successes of Power's early career, has been suspended until a replacement can be found.
 - London, 24 November: The mountains of north Wales double for China in the 1930s in 20th Century-Fox's The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman as a missionary who carries the Christian faith to regions dominated by war lords and converts a mandarin played by Robert Donat. Curd Jürgens is cast as the Chinese soldier with whom Bergman falls in love, only to leave him when a party of children must be led to safety over the mountains. Based on the real-life story of Gladys Alyward, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness is a moving story that holds back from pounding the religious keys too hard. However, its release is tinged with sadness. Clearly speaking with great difficulty, Donat delivers the last line of the film to a tearful Bergman: "We shall never see each other again, I think. Farewell!" The words were prophetic. Not long after filming finished, Donat died in a hospital from the chronic asthma that had dogged his career since the early 1930s.
- New York, 15 December: The Old Man and the Sea, directed by John Sturges from the Hemingway novella and starring Spencer Tracy, has been awarded first prize by the Catholic International Office of Cinema.
- London, 18 December: Boris Karloff's two young nephews aged 10 and 13 have been found with their throats cut. The children's mother is accused of the murders.
- Paris, 18 December: Brigitte Bardot was at the Palais de Justice for the injunction proceedings instigated by her against Bruno Coquatrix, from the Comédie Caumartin Théâtre, over the title of his latest revue, Ça va Bardot!.
- London, 21 December: Ingrid Bergman today married producer Lars Schmidt. He is the Swedish star's third husband.
- Washington, DC, 31 December: The U.S. Treasury has received $425,000 in settlement of back taxes from Charles Chaplin.
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20 March - Conyers, GA, 
25 July - Hollywood,