- Paris, 6 January:
 The Franco-Mexican co-production La Fièvre monte à El Pao (Republic of Sin), directed by Luis Buñuel, has been released less than a month after the premature death of its star, Gérard Philipe. He had been ill during the shooting of this steamy melodrama in Mexico. Philipe plays an idealistic man, who falls under the spell of Maria Félix, the widow of the assassinated governor of a Latin American republic. Philipe eventually becomes governor, only to find that power corrupts. Miss Félix's sexy charms are given full rein, but Philipe makes a disappointing exit in an underwritten part.
- Hollywood, 16 January: The Screen Writers Guild has called for a strike. It is demanding that its members receive a percentage of the television rights for films.
 - Hollywood, 18 January: Today sees the start of shooting on Fox's Let's Make Love, co-starring Marllyn Monroe and French import Yves Montand. The latter plays an international tycoon who falls in love with off-Broadway star Marilyn but decides not to reveal his true identity because he is the satirical subject of the show in which she is appearing. Instead he masquerades as a struggling actor, hiring the likes of Bing Crosby, Marlon Brando and Gene Kelly to teach him the rudiments of their craft. It is rumored that the tycoon in Norman Krasna's original screenplay, written with Yul Brynner in mind, bore a resemblance to Howard Hughes that was a little to close for comfort. Rock Hudson, William Holden, Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Cary Grant and James Stewart all turned down the role before Montand was hired by Fox, on the advice of Monroe's husband Arthur Miller, and was installed in Hollywood with his wife Simone Signoret.
- Stockholm, 8 February: Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring) with Max von Sydow opens today. Ingmar Bergman's film is another foray into the dark and primitive world of medieval Sweden.
- Paris, 18 February: For his first film in 10 years Jean Cocteau has remained true to his adage, "Everything that is explained or proven is vulgar." To the exasperation of film critics, nothing is clear in Cocteau's dreamlike evocation of a poet's experiences in The Testament of Orpheus, with the great poet himself in the leading role.
- Paris, 21 February:
 Just a few days after the release of his final film, Le Trou (The Hole), Jacques Becker has died at the age of 54. Becker, who was very ill during the shooting of the movie, was courageously determined to complete it. The subject, drawn from the novel by José Giovanni, deals with the attempts of four long-term prisoners to escape their cells by digging a tunnel through the prison vaults and into the Paris sewers. Using non-professional actors, natural sound and an austere camera style, Becker seemed to be taking a new direction. Sadly, we shall never know where it would have led him.
- Paris, 3 March: Release of Yeux san visage (Eyes Without a Face), starring Alida Valli and Pierre Brasseur, and directed by Georges Franju.
 - Paris, 10 March: The director René Clément has captured the spirit of the times with his latest film, Plein soleil (Purple Noon), based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, for which he has hired the services of New Wave screenwriter Paul Gégauff. It's a suntanned film noir, brilliantly photographed by Henri Decaë and redolent of murky Hollywood B-movies of the 1940s, in which the 24-year-old Alain Delon delivers a persuasive performance as Highsmith's charming psychopath Tom Ripley, plotting to rob his playboy friend Maurice Ronet blind, steal his girlfriend Marie Laforét and then take his life.
- Paris, 16 March:
 Jean-Luc Godard's first feature film À bout de souffle (Breathless) has caused a sensation. Based on an idea by François Truffaut, and dedicated to Monogram Pictures (Hollywood's all B-movie studio), it tells of a young car thief (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who kills a policeman and then goes on the run with his American girlfriend (Jean Seberg). The plot is conventional, but the treatment is the opposite. By attempting to recapture the directness and economy of the American gangster movie, Godard has used a hand-held camera (often with the cameraman, Raoul Coutard, in a wheelchair), location shooting, and brutal jump cuts, which eliminate the usual establishing shots. The acting of the anarchic Belmondo and the sweetly seductive Seberg leaves audiences breathless. Godard achieved the immediacy of the performances by cueing the actors, who were not permitted to learn their lines, during takes.
 - Hollywood, 5 April: Five years after Italian actress Anna Magnani walked off with the Best Actress Oscar® for The Rose Tattoo, the Academy has once again chosen to bestow the honor on a foreign star. This year's winner is French actress Simone Signoret, acclaimed for her warm, sensual and moving performance in the British work, Room at the Top, directed by Jack Clayton, in which she co-starred as the lonely "older woman" who is seduced and then abandoned by a young, ambitious working-class man (Laurence Harvey). Adapted from John Braine's bestseller, the film also won the Best Screenplay award in the category for material based on another medium. Best Supporting Actress was Shelley Winters for The Diary of Anne Frank but, thereafter, the evening belonged to MGM's remake of Ben-Hur. This awesomely spectacular epic, which took nine months to shoot at a cost of $15 million, was amply rewarded. Apart from both the Best Picture and Best Director (William Wyler) Oscars®, the film swept the board with Best Actor (Charlton Heston), Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith), and the Oscars® for Cinematography, Art Direction, Sound, Musical Score, Film Editing, Special Effects and Costume Design, thereby setting a new record. This bonanza denied Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot its considerable due, but nobody can argue with the achievement of Ben-Hur. The Best Foreign Film was Marcel Camus' exotic and seductive Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), making France the winner two years in a row.
- Hollywood, 7 April: John Huston has finished shooting his latest Western, The Unforgiven, with Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn as the central characters and featuring Lillian Gish.
- Hollywood, 10 April:
 The start of a new decade appears to mark the beginning of the end for the notorious Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s. Whereas many of the blacklisted directors were forced to search abroad for work, while actors retired or turned to the theater, many of the scriptwriters were able to carry on working anonymously or under various aliases. Thus, it seems only just that Dalton Trumbo, one of the "Hollywood Ten," is the credited writer on two new films -- Spartacus, produced by its star Kirk Douglas' own Bryna company for Universal, and Otto Preminger's Exodus for UA. It is amusing now to note that Trumbo appears to have won a 1956 Academy Award for his original story for The Brave One under the name "Robert Rich," while the 1957 Oscar® for The Bridge on the River Kwai, won by French novelist Pierre Boulle -- who doesn't speak English -- reflected yet another cover-up for two blacklisted writers, exiled in England -- Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson.
- New York, 17 April: Opening of George Cukor's Heller in Pink Tights, which stars Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn. It's an unusual Western about a theatrical troupe traveling through the Far West in a horse-drawn wagon.
- New York, 17 April: Henry Fonda's daughter Jane has acted in her first film Tall Story, co-starring Anthony Perkins and directed by Joshua Logan.
- Paris, 1 May: Brigitte Bardot is making La Verité (The Truth) with co-star Sami Frey for Henri-Georges Clouzot.
 - London, 16 May: Director Michael Powell has stirred up a hornets' nest with his latest picture Peeping Tom, the third in a series of horror films produced by Anglo-Amalgamated. It stars Carl Boehm as a psychopathic film technician who murders women -- one played by Moira Shearer -- by impaling them on a spike hidden in his 16mm camera. The film is ugly, daring and brilliant, though there are many who are offended. Powell himself plays Boehm's father, a psychologist who deliberatley terrified his small son and would then film his reactions. In a further twist, the child in those films within the film is played by Powell's son Columba. One outraged critic has suggested that the only way to deal with Peeping Tom is to flush it down the toilet. Few if any can see the dark humor of the picture or grasp the notion that Peeping Tom is a densely layered examination of the conflict between Life and Art, Powell's principal preoccupation, into which the controversial director has poured a lifetime in films.
- Cannes, 17 May:
 The works of Michelangelo Antonioni have often divided the public opinion. The showing of L'Avventura, however, has been greeted with rare hostility. In the film a group of rich Italians heads out on a yachting trip to a deserted volcanic island in the Mediterranean. When they are about to leave the island, they find Anna (Lea Massari), the main character up to this point, has gone missing. Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), Anna's boyfriend, and Claudia (Monica Vitti), Anna's friend, try without success to find her. While looking for the missing friend, Claudia and Sandro develop an attraction for each other. When they get back to land, they continue the search with no success. Sandro and Claudia proceed to become lovers, and all but forget about the missing Anna.
Naturally, this indignant outcry has provoked a rapid reaction from admirers of the film. A manifesto in support of L'Avventura was immediately drawn up. This states: "Aware of the exceptional importance of Michelangelo Antonioni's film, and disgusted by the demonstration of hostility which it has engendered, the members of the film profession and the critics whose names are signed below, also wish to express their wholehearted admiration for the maker of this film. Others who share that enthusiasm wish to make known their approval." Included among the signatories are film directors: Roberto Rossellini, Jean Baral, Mario Ruspoli Di Poggio-Suasa, Nelly Kaplan, Ennio Lorenzini... performers: Maurice Ronet, Alice Saprich... producers and distributors: Yvonne Decaris, Anatole Daumon... journalists and writers: Georges Sadoul, Robert Benayoun, Janine-André Bazin... and a large number of magazines: Image et Son, Le Parisien Libérè, Cinéma 60, La Marseillaise, Paris-Match. The statement, published by Les Bulletins du Festival, was then handed to the director of the controversial film.
 - Cannes, 20 May: This year the mood at the Cannes Film Festival has changed. Four days ago, the director Michelangelo Antonioni, with his leading lady Monica Vitti, left the Grand Palace extremely upset after the screening of L'Avventura, which was shown in a hostile atmosphere. However, they have been well compensated by the jury's perspicacity, presided over by the author Georges Simenon. The film received the Special Jury Prize for "its remarkable contribution to the search for a new cinematographic language." In general, the jury and critics have shown approval of Italian directors this year. Federico Fellini was the unanimous winner of the Golden Palm for La Dolce vita, though this did not prevent the film from being booed by sections of the audience. The baroque fresco, shot at Cinecittà, casts an ironic and scathing eye on the world of stars, pseudo-intellectuals and paparazzi. Perhaps, it is Fellini's very lucidity that has disturbed some people. Marcello Mastroianni, as a gossip enthusiast, Anouk Aimée and Anita Ekberg, among the large cast, are convincing in their roles as members of the decadent Roman society.
- Paris, 26 May: Release of Peter Brook's Moderato cantabile (Seven Days... Seven Nights in the UK). While making the film Jean-Paul Belmondo crashed the car in which he was driving Jeanne Moreau's 10-year-old son Jerôme. The child was seriously injured and despite his now being out of danger, the press is still critical of the actor.
- Munich, 31 May:
 Until now, Marlene Dietrich has not returned to her homeland since she left for the United States during the spring of 1930. For the first time, she is facing German audiences during her long concert tour around the country. In most of the towns her show has gone off without incident, but in some, "Marlene Go Home" has been daubed on the walls, and she has been pelted with tomatoes. A section of the population has not forgiven her for her exile. Yet she was a triumph in Berlin and was rapturously received in Munich. "I'll be back," she promised.
- Nantes, 7 June: Jacques Demy is dedicating his new film Lola, with Anouk Aimée, to Max Ophüls as an homage to the great director's Lola Montes.
- Paris, 10 June: Opening of Philippe Agostini's Le Dialogue des Carmélites (The Carmelites), based on the novel by Georges Bernanos, with Jeanne Moreau, Alida Valli, Madeleine Renaud and Pierre Brasseur.
 - New York, 15 June: Billy Wilder's latest project, The Apartment, is bound to attract large and enthusiastic audiences. Wilder, who wrote the screenplay with his partner I. A. L. Diamond, once again demonstrates an outstanding gift for brilliant plotting and sparkling dialogue, and an acute eye and ear for the idiosyncracies of the human race. More tellingly, he manages to make a hilarious comedy, combined with a touching romance, out of raw ingredients that include questionable sexual morals, loneliness in the big city and even an attempted suicide. Throbbing with the pulse of New York City, the movie concerns bachelor office clerk C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) who is prevailed upon to lend the key of his apartment to his married superiors for their illicit liaisons. Returning home after one of these assignations is supposedly over, he stumbles on the inert form of Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the office elevator girl whom he secretly fancies. What happens from that moment on is the basis for a comedic tour de force from Lemmon, a champagne performance from MacLaine and, above all, the satisfactory working out of a situation in which Wilder obliquely comments on the less appetizing side of supposed respectability.
- New York, 7 July:
 Writer-director Richard Brooks has bucked the current Biblical trend, producing a movie about religion that is not set in the time of Christ. Elmer Gantry, adapted by Brooks from Sinclair Lewis' novel, stars Burt Lancaster as the silver-tongued salesman who joins evangelist Jean Simmons' barnstorming crew in the West of the 1920s. However, the group's phony mission is exposed by the skeptical journalist Arthur Kennedy while he tracks the evangelists' Bible-thumping progress through the American heartland. Shirley Jones, until now associated with virginal roles, is cast as Lulu Bains, the blowzy hooker redeemed by Lancaster. And singer Patti Page makes her screen debut as a gospel singer. Playing the ambiguous Sister Sharon, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Aimée Semple MacPherson, Simmons gives a stunning performance. No wonder that Brooks considers his wife "a remarkable human being and an incredible actress."
- Los Angeles, 11 July: A friend and staunch supporter of John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra with fellow singers Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. opened the Democratic National Convention by singing the national anthem.
- Switzerland, 17 July: Audrey Hepburn gave birth to her first child today, a boy, by her actor-director husband Mel Ferrer. Hepburn, who had suffered several miscarriages prior to this confinement (the last being after a fall from a horse during the filming of The Unforgiven just over a year ago) is reported to be well. The happy couple have called the baby Sean.
 - Hollywood, 28 July: The well-known set designer Cedric Gibbons has died after a long illness. Starting his career at the Thomas A. Edison Studio in New York in 1914, he moved to Goldwyn in 1916 and became head of Metro's art department in 1924. He and his first wife, Delores Del Rio, lived in an art deco mansion of his own design. During his 32 years with the studio he created sets for over 2,000 films and was the worthy recipient of 11 of the Academy Awards, which, in fact, he also designed.
- Los Angeles, 10 August:
 Alfred Hitchcock, cinematic torturer supreme, has stepped into the world of madness with Psycho. And, with typical perversity, he disposes of his leading lady, Janet Leigh, one-third of the way into the picture. Leigh plays a Phoenix real estate secretary, on the lam with $42,000 of her boss' money crammed into her bag. The theft is not her big mistake. It's her decision to check in for the night at the seedy Bates Motel -- 12 cabins and 12 vacancies -- with old Mrs. Bates' American Gothic house perched above on a hill. Then, after sharing a frugal meal with Mrs. Bates' twitchy son Norman, Leigh decides to take a shower. That's her last mistake. In the jet-black comedy that follows we discover the true identity of Mrs. Bates as well as the true nature of Norman. Hitchcock is at his most masterfully manipulative in Psycho, but the revelation of the picture is Anthony Perkins, son of the late actor Osgood Perkins, as the haunted Norman Bates. Gangling, stuttering and slyly attractive with a snake-fast flash of a smile, Perkins animates Norman with a creepy life of his own. It's hard not to sympathize with him as, beneath the savage, slashing beaks of his stuffed bird collection, he shares a moment of mutual loneliness with Leigh before going on to spy on her taking a shower through a hole in the wall. The film ends with Norman's nervous chatter finally silenced as he crouches under a blanket in the city jail. Hitchcock is reportedly nervous about the commercial potential of Psycho, which he playfully describes as "my first horror film."
- Los Angeles, 1 September: Yves Montand, during an interview with gossip columnist Hedda Hopper for the Los Angeles Times, is reported to have said in answer to questions about his relationship with Marilyn Monroe, his co-star in Let's Make Love, that "Nothing could destroy my marriage." His wife is actress Simone Signoret.
- Los Angeles, 7 September: Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy have resigned from the Screen Actors Guild. Neither of them has made a film since 1956 when they co-starred in Hellcats of the Navy.
- London, 28 September: Rouben Mamoulian has begun directing the first scenes for Cleopatra, with Elizabeth Taylor in the title role. Miss Taylor has been hired for the fabulous sum of $1 million plus 10 percent of the profits.
 - New York, 28 September:
 It has been known for some time that the American cinema also has its "angry young men." A statement put out by the New American Cinema Group claims: "We don't want rose-colored films any more, but films the color of blood." Created by Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke and several other New York directors, the group has the same aims as the French New Wave and the British Free Cinema movements. They wish to shake up to old cinema and make independent films, "rough, badly-made perhaps, but alive." In the U.S., which is still the mecca of filmmaking, their pronouncements seem much bolder than those of their European confreres. Of Lithuanian origin, Mekas has made a number of experimental films in 16mm. He also founded the magazine Film Culture in 1956. A dancer by education, Clarke has principally filmed dancers, most notably Daniel Nagrin in Dance of Love, and Anna Sokolow in Bullfight.
- New York, 6 October:
 Twelve million dollars, two years of intense preparation and 8,000 Spanish extras have been poured into Universal's Spartacus, a sword and sandal blockbuster to rival Ben-Hur. Kirk Douglas is the star and executive producer, taking the title role of the rebellious Thracian slave hero who gave Rome the runaround in 73 B.C., leading an army of gladiators against the legions. Douglas is also up against some heavyweight British acting competition: Laurence Olivier as his nemesis, the general Crassus; Charles Laughton as the senator Gracchus; and Peter Ustinov as Batiatus, the sweatily venal dealer in gladiators. Tony Curtis plays Crassus' servant Antoninus and Jean Simmons is Varinia, the slave girl for whom Douglas falls. This is very much Douglas' production. After a week of shooting, he fired his original choice as director, Anthony Mann, and replaced him with 30-year-old Stanley Kubrick, who imparts a degree of intimacy and personal depth to the story as the epic action unfolds in Technirama 70. Dalton Trumbo's literate screenplay, adapted from Howard Fast's sprawling novel, is the first for which he has been credited since falling foul of the Hollywood blacklist. Filmed on location outside Madrid and also on the Universal backlot, Spartacus has prompted Douglas to observe that if it's a thrilling spectacle, $12 million "is a drop in the bucket. If not, $12 million was too much."
- London, 8 October: At the opening of his film version of John Osborne's The Entertainer, director Tony Richardson said that making low-budget films for limited audiences could be the answer to Britain's "ailing film industry."
 - New York, 18 October: Exuberant Greek actress Melina Mercouri explodes on to the screen in never on sunday, as an unrepentant hooker happily plying her trade in the port of Piraeus and effortlessly thrwarting American writer Jules Dassin's attempts to reform her. It is a case of uptight America colliding with sensual Mediterranean warmth with chain-smoking, gravel-voiced Mercouri walking away with the honors. Dassin, exiled to Europe by the Hollywood blacklist, has his work cut out as Mercouri's co-star, husband and director.
- Paris, 28 October:
 After filming Ascenseur pour l'echafaud (Frantic) and Les Amants (The Lovers), Louis Malle has changed again and taken another direction. His new work, Zazie dans le métro, seems to defy all classification, going against the grain of conventional comedy. Because of this, its commercial possibilities could be severely limited. Malle has tried very boldly to create visual equivalents to the eccentric syntax of Raymond Queneau's novel by using a series of cinematic tricks -- speeded-up action, slow motion, quotes from other movies and silent-comedy techniques. It is a brightly colored surreal view of Paris, including a wild scene on the Eiffel Tower. Yet the director, with the assistance of screenwriter Jean-Paul Rappeneau, has preserved the essentials of the story and much of Queneau's dialogue. This movie's burlesque style is justified because the world is perceived from the viewpoint of precocious, foul-mouthed little Zazie, marvelously played by Catherine Demongeot. The child spends 36 hours with her female impersonator Uncle Gabriel (Philippe Noiret) in Paris with the sole intention of going for a ride on the metro, but a series of frenetic incidents, often instigated by Zazie, conspires to prevent this.
- Hollywood, 2 November: Clark Gable, who has just finished his final scene for The Misfits, confided to director John Huston that he considered it to be one of his finest pieces of acting.
- Madrid, 14 November: Anthony Mann has started filming his super-production of El Cid, the legendary stroy set in the 11th century about how the Castilian kings won Spain back from the Moors. Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren co-star.
- Los Angeles, 16 November: The French actress Simone Signoret has been quoted by the Los Angeles Times as having said, "If Marilyn Monroe is in love with my husband (Yves Montand) that only proves she has good taste, because I am also in love with him."
 - Nevada, 16 November: On 11 November, after shooting had been completed on The Misfits, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were officially divorced. Miller had written the original screenply for his wife, but their already difficult relationship deteriorated considerably during the troubled making of the film, directed by John Huston in the Nevada desert. Monroe has been in a poor mental state and was never on time on the set, keeping her co-stars Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach waiting around in the high temperatures. She was sleeping badly and taking Nembutal, and therefore could not be moved in the morning. Production was suspended for a few weeks when Monroe was hospitalized. She tried to reach Yves Montand, with whom she had fallen in love during the making of her previous film, Let's Make Love, but he refused to answer her calls. It does seem unlikely that Monroe will be well enough to appear in her new film, Something's Got to Give, due to start shooting next spring.
- New York, 17 November: Release of Butterfield 8, directed by Daniel Mann, based on Steinbeck's novel and starring Elizabeth Taylor as a disillusioned call girl.
- California, 17 November:
 Only a short time after finishing work on Huston's The Misfits, Clark Gable has died of a heart attack at his Encino home. The strain of the production, in which he insisted on performing all his own stunts, had taken its toll on the aging King of Hollywood. A few weeks ago he learned that his wife, Kay Spreckels, was pregnant and that at the age of 60 he was to be a father for the first time. "It will be a boy," Gable confidently predicted, but the child will never know his father. Commenting on The Misfits, producer Frank Taylor has said, "We felt that there was only one actor in the world who expressed the essence of complete masculinity and virility that we needed for the leading role -- and that was Gable." Funeral services will be held at Forest Lawn, where he will be buried alongside Carole Lombard, the great love his life, from whose death he never really recovered. He had often said, with characteristically gruff modesty, "If something happens to me, don't make a circus out of it."
 - Los Angeles, 23 November: John Sturges' latest Western, The Magnificent Seven, is a straight lift from the 1954 classic Shichinin no samurai (The Seven Samurai). Yul Brynner leads an ill-assorted band of gunfighters against bandits terrorizing a Mexican village. These cynical professionals discover a moral purpose in the task, though some pay with their lives. Sturges' sure hand orchestrates the confident swagger of the seven in a movie that looks to be launching the careers of co-stars Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and bandit leader Eli Wallach.
- Tahiti, 28 November: Marlon Brando has arrived here for the filming of MGM's Mutiny on the Bounty, under the direction of Carol Reed. Despite a year's work, the screenplay is still incomplete.
- Los Angeles, 6 December: Release of Blake Edwards' latest comedy, Operation Petticoat, with Tony Curtis and Cary Grant.
- Japan, 31 December: Production figures rose to 555 films this year compared to 370 in 1954.
|
17 March - Sicily, Italy,