- Prague, 3 January: Vera Chytilova is filming Strop, an innovative film dealing with the world of high fashion models and women's social conditions.
- London, 8 January: Gary Cooper, who is on location for Michael Anderson's The Naked Edge, was received by Prince Philip.
- London, 18 January: Rouben Mamoulian, the director of Cleopatra, has resigned after refusing Lawrence Durrell's script.
- Washington, DC, 19 January: Frank Sinatra is organizing a gala evening in honor of tomorrow's inauguration of President Kennedy. Harry Belafonte, Shirley MacLaine, Bette Davis and Sidney Poitier are among the personalities to be presented to the President.
- New York, 1 February:
 Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift were present at the world premiere of their new film, The Misfits, directed by John Huston. This gala performance was given in memory of Clark Gable, one of the stars of the film, who died of a heart attack two and half months ago, a mere couple of weeks after shooting was completed. Gable's death is said to have been hastened by the strenuous roping of stallions demanded by his role. The Misfits has the smell of doom about it, not only because of Gable's death, or Monroe's disintegrating marriage to Arthur Miller, who wrote the screenplay, but because of the disenchanted subject of the film itself. (Ironically, the film is set in and around Reno, the divorce capital.) Huston described his reaction on first reading Miller's script: "I read it like a boxer with my guard up, and suddenly I received a punch in the pit of my stomach." It tells of three failed men who come together in the Nevada desert to catch wild mustangs to be sold and slaughtered for dog food. They are an aging cowboy (Gable), a broken bronco-buster (Clift) and a former wartime pilot (Eli Wallach). Their values are put into perspective by a tender-hearted divorcée (Monroe), who is repelled by the harsh cruelty of their calling. Despite the fraught conditions of filming in extremely high temperatures, the stars give among their most profound performances. Huston wisely concentrates on the famous faces, as well as providing superbly shot visual set pieces, such as the final roundup.
- London, 1 February: Joseph L. Mankiewicz has arrived from the United States to take over the direction of Cleopatra.
- Tahiti, 25 February: The whole film crew for Mutiny on the Bounty has been ordered back to Hollywood after director Carol Reed's refusal of a new schedule imposed by MGM. He is to be replaced by Lewis Milestone.
- Switzerland, 3 March: Danish actress Anna Karina married the director Jean-Luc Godard today. Godard has just directed her in Une femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman).
- London, 6 March: Elizabeth Taylor has been in a coma since her operation for lung congestion on 4 March. She has stopped breathing several times and the six doctors in charge of her case fear for her life.
- Dakar, 4 April: The newsreel Senegalese Cinema News became a weekly production on the country's independence day.
- Hollywood, 18 April:
 Bob Hope was this year's master of ceremonies at the Academy Awards gathering, which was produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Vincente Minnelli. Top film of the year is Billy Wilder's The Apartment, which has garnered five Oscars®, including Best Picture and Director. The Best Actor Award has gone to Burt Lancaster for Elmer Gantry. Elizabeth Taylor, only recently recovered from pneumonia, has won the Best Actress award on a tide of sympathy for her role as a call girl in Butterfield 8. Supporting Actor and Actress awards went to Peter Ustinov for Spartacus and Shirley Jones for Elmer Gantry, respectively. There was a moment of high emotion at the end of the ceremony when Gary Cooper, too ill to attend, was awarded a Special Oscar® for his services to film.
 - New York, 8 May: American cinema never properly learned how to exploit the voluptuously earthy appeal of Italian actress Sophia Loren. In films such as Boy on a Dolphin (1957) and Desire Under the Elms (1958), she appeared almost as a caricature of herself. Now American audiences are able to judge her talents on her home ground in Vittorio De Sica's new movie La Ciociara (Two Women), Loren plays a widowed mother of a 13-year-old daughter, fleeing south after Allied bombing of Rome in 1943. They survive enemy attack, deprivation and, ultimately, rape by Moroccan Allied soldiers. The English title of this project, based on a story by Alberto Moravia, refers to both mother and daughter; however it is Loren's powerful performance on which most attendion is focused. Minus the glossy image fabricated for her in Hollywood, Loren's gutsy acting confirms Jean Cocteau's aphorism, "A bird sings best on its family tree." It is some years since De Sica made his name with neo-realist classics such as The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Umberto D (1952), yet the director has not lost his ability to move us, for the film contains many touching and harrowing scenes.
- Los Angeles, 13 May:
 Gary Cooper has died of cancer at his Bel Air home. His career had spanned 35 years, and, except at it beginning and very end, he was one of Hollywood's biggest stars. Between 1936 and 1957 he was only out of the Exhibitors' Top Ten list three times, and in 1953 he headed it. Of his own career, he once said, "Until I came along, all the leading men were handsome, but luckily they wrote a lot of stories about the fellow next door." Charles Laughton had this to say: "He had something I'll never have: he had no idea just how great an actor he was." And from John Barrymore: "He was the greatest actor in the world. He managed effortlessly to do that which we strive towards all our lives: to be natural."
- Paris, 18 May: Alain Delon told Nicole Zand of the France-Ovservateur that he would like to make films that could be listened to like an opera.
 - New York, 31 May: One-Eyed Jacks, the first film to be directed by Marlon Brando, starring himself, has just been released in 128 movie theaters across America. It was while he was working on The Young Lions that he announced his intention to move to the other side of the camera, explaining that it would allow him "a greater opportunity for expression." He stared shooting the Western on 2 December 1958, with a budget of $2 million and a schedule of 60 days. Filming lasted six months, cost more than $6 million, and exposed more than a million feet of film, an all-time record. Originally, One-Eyed Jacks was to have been directed by Stanley Kubrick, with a screenplay by Sam Peckinpah and Brando in the lead. After disagreements between the director and star, Brando suggested he direct the film himself. The first version of this story of a man's quest for the fellow outlaw who betrayed him, ran four hours 42 minutes, but was cut to exactly half that length by Paramount. The film is still rather long, rambling and self-indulgent, but with superb VistaVision photography by Charles Lang Jr., and a brooding Byronic performance by its star and director.
- Madrid, 31 May:
 The head of the Spanish Film Administration has begun to curse the triumph of Viridiana, Luis Buñuel's first film in his native land for 29 years. The fact that this "impious, sacreligious" film was awarded the Golden Palm at Cannes has resulted in the official being dismissed from his post. He had, unforgivably it seems, allowed the film to be shown at Cannes as a result of a strange set of circumstances that worked to Buñuel's advantage. The film, edited in Paris, was not completed until five days prior to the opening of the Festival. It was too short a time for a copy to go to Madrid for inspection, and was sent directly to Cannes. On the day of the awards, the film was denounced by the Vatican and by the Spanish authorities. Why all this stir? Consider the scene illustrated on the right: A scene of sadness and death amidst orderly surroundings. But this is Buñuel, and this charmingly cultivated bourgeois necrophiliac is about to have intercourse with a fantasy: the former nun he has dressed as a bride, drugged, and now aranges like the corpse he wants her to be for sex.
- Mexico, 4 July: Lauren Bacall has married the actor Jason Robards in Ensenada, a small Mexican village near the California border. Robards, who was a close friend of Bacall's first husband Humphrey Bogart, was a great support to the actress after Bogey's death in 1957.
 - Berlin, 5 July: Michelangelo Antonioni's newest film, La Notte (The Night), has won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The film concentrates on 24 hours in the life of a Milanese novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife (Jeanne Moreau), during which they visit a dying friend in the hospital, go to a nightclub, meet a rich industrialist's daughter (Monica Vitti) at a party, and face the emptiness of their lives and marriage. Following L'Avventura, the director further explores an alienated couple placed in an unresponsive environment. Here, the background is the cold beauty of Milan's modern architecture, and the streets through which Moreau wanders despondently at one point -- the best sequence in an impressive film.
- Paris, 5 July: In the press release for Il Bell'Antonio, Mauro Bolognini refers to the still delicate subject of masculine impotence. Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale co-star.
- Moscow, 23 July: At the International Film Festival, the main prize was awarded to the Japanese film Hadaka no shima (Naked Island) by Kaneto Shindo.
- Locarno, 30 July: The top award at the festival here has gone to Nobi (Fires on the Plain) by Kon Ichikawa.
- New York, 2 August: Astor Films is negotiating for U.S. and Canadian distribution rights for Roger Vadim's film version of Les Liaisons dangereuses 1960. The film, which co-stars Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe, opened in Paris in late 1959, but was then banned for export as it presented contemporary France in an unfavorable light.
- Paris, 9 August: Pierre Kast, a former film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, has made his second feature film La Morte-siason des amours (The Season of Love), starring Pierre Vaneck, Françoise Arnoul and Daniel Gélin.
- London, 1 September:
 Dirk Bogarde has decided to cast aside his matinee idol image to play a homosexual barrister in Victim, directed by Basil Dearden. He faces ruin when a young man with whom he has been having an affair hangs himself in a police cell. His death drives Bogarde to expose a ring of blackmailers who exploit the fact that homosexuality remains a serious criminal offense. In the process, Bogarde discovers that the victims range from an elderly hairdresser to an aristocratic member of his own gentleman's club. This is a brave film that draws an even braver performance from Bogarde, who has finally tired of the comedy, war and costume films he has been making for the last 10 years. He receives solid support from Sylvia Syms as the wife who has to come to terms with her husband's secret life.
 - Paris, 1 September: Thirty-year-old Jean-Gabriel Albicocco seems to have scored a great success with his first feature, La Femme aux yeux d'or (The Girl With the Golden Eyes), starring his attractive wife, Marie Laforêt, in the title role. An updated adaptation of Balzac's The Story of the Thirteen, this stylish, stylized and provocative film is set in and around the Paris fashion houses of the 1960s. A man (Paul Guers) who is working in the world of haute couture falls for a girl (Laforêt) of whom he knows nothing, not even her name. He enlists the aid of a powerful group of men known as "The Thirteen," and soon discovers that she is the lover of a female colleague (Françoise Prévost). He becomes a threat to their lesbian relationship, and the tale ends with a powerful crime of passion, when one of the women fatally stabs the other.
- Paris, 6 September:
 Jean-Luc Godard's third picture Une femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman), features his wife of a few months, the Danish actress Anna Karina, whose first appearance in a French film was in the musical short Petit jour with Godard and Jacques Brel last year. She starred in Godard's Le Petit soldat (The Little Soldier), which the French government has banned. Now most audiences will be getting a first glimpse of the ravishing Karina, who plays a nightclub stripper. She wants a baby by her lover (Jean-Claude Brialy), but when he refuses to oblige, she turns to his best friend (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Set mainly in a Paris apartment, Godard's first color film is a breezy homage to the spirit of MGM musicals. Jeanne Moreau appears briefly as herself.
 - Paris, 22 September: Jean-Pierre Melville's latest film, Léon Morin, prêtre (Léon Morin, Priest), originally ran over three hours, but the director himself decided to reduce it to 117 minutes. Adapted from the novel by Béatrix Beck, the film is set in rural France during the German Occupation, where a young atheist widow (Emmanuelle Riva) falls in love with a priest (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who converts her to religion. Not as pious as it sounds, Melville's quietly polemical film explores the humane character of the priest, played in a surprisingly restrained and persuasive manner by Belmondo.
- New York, 25 September:
 Paul Newman plays Fast Eddie Felson, the disenchanted difter and pool-hall shark in Robert Rossen's The Hustler, a story about winners and losers in the tough world of marathon games for high stakes. Fast Eddie has his sights set on Jackie Gleason's portly maestro, Minnesota Fats. Eddie has already had one disastrous encounter in New York, from which he had emerged both psychologically and physically battered. Nursed back to health by crippled alcoholic Piper Laurie, abandoning his long-time manager Myron McCormick, and then taken up by the hardbitten professional gambler George C. Scott, Fast Eddie rediscovers his will to win and heads for a gripping climactic encounter with the Fat Man. Rossen's brilliant film reeks of the smoke and sweat of the dingy pool halls in which men like Fast Eddie hunt for fast bucks.
- Hollywood, 27 September: The most successful musical in Broadway history, My Fair Lady, is about to be sold to the movies for a record price. Warner Bros. is reportedly prepared to pay $5 million in cash plus 47.5 percent of the film's gross box-office receipts over $20 million. Herman Levin, who produced the musical, has 26 days to negotiate a better offer before the deal is made final.
- Rome, 28 September: Filming of Cleopatra has restarted under Joseph L. Mankiewicz's direction and with a few cast changes. Rex Harrison replaces Peter Finch as Caesar, and Marc Anthony will now be played by Richard Burton, not Stephen Boyd.
- New York, 3 October: The gradual liberalizing of the provisions of the Hollywood Production Code -- first spelled out in 1930 and strictly enforced since 1934 -- continues apace. The MPAA has just announced that the strict ban on depicting sexual "perversions" such as homosexuality and lesbianism has now been lifted to allow discreet or tasteful treatment of such themes. Thus, a Code seal can be granted to two major new films that have not yet been released, Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent and William Wyler's The Children's Hour, adapted from Lillian Hellman's play.
- New York, 5 October:
 Audrey Hepburn, who spent the year recovering from a miscarriage sustained while on location for The Unforgiven, and has subsequently given birth to a baby son, is back on the screens from today in Breakfast at Tiffany's. From director Blake Edwards, this rather sanitized adaptation of Truman Capote's novella has not, reportedly, met with the writer's approval. Certainly, it is true that his off-beat heroine, Holly Golightly, was hardly the innocent she becomes in the hands of Miss Hepburn. Capote's hooker is not just a crazy kook, looking to marry a millionaire, who captivates George Peppard's struggling novelist in the upstais apartment. That said, Hepburn makes Holly her own, transcending the screenplay's bland ambiguities, and entrancing with her own special brand of vulnerability. Henry Mancini's haunting musical score is outstanding.
 - Hollywood, 11 October: Critics are already parading Warren Beatty as the new James Dean after his debut performance opposite Natalie Wood in Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass. They play a pair of teenage lovers in 1920s Kansas, torn apart by parental disapproval. For a newcomer, Beatty received the exceptionally high fee of $200,000. Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1937, Beatty is the younger brother, by three years, of Shirley MacLaine. He made his acting way in TV before appearing on Broadway in A Loss of Roses by William Inge, who wrote the screenplay for Splendor in the Grass. Beatty now has a contract for several more films with Kazan.
- Beverly Hills, 13 October: Director Zoltan Korda, brother of producer-director Alexander Korda and production designer Vincent Korda, has died.
- Hollywood, 19 October:
 Leonard Bernstein's 1957 landmark Broadway musical, West Side Story, has now been made into a dynamic film. The director Robert Wise has transformed the essentially theatrical mixture of opera, ballet, musical comedy and social drama into cinematically pleasing entertainment that has been shot in Technicolor and Ultra Panavision 70. As in the theater, however, it is the choreography of Jerome Robbins, who receives co-director credit, and the vigorous dancing that dominate the movie. The picture opens with a helicopter shot of Manhattan, the camera zooming in on the finger-snapping American-born youths of the Jets, the sworn enemies of the Sharks, a Puerto Rican gang. They then dance balletically through the streets, actually filmed on location on West 64th Street. Maria and Tony, the star-crossed lovers from opposing factions in this updating of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, are sympathetically played by Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer, though their singing voices are dubbed by Marni Nixon and Jimmy Bryant, respectively. When they meet for the first time at the gymnasium hop, the lights dim, and they only have eyes for each other, just like their illustrious Veronese models. The lyrics of Stephen Sondheim come over brilliantly in the two humorous numbers, "Gee, Officer Krupke" and "America," the latter danced and sung with panache by Rita Moreno, George Chakiris and chorus on the roof of a building. The melodious balcony-duet, "Tonight," that is sung by the sweethearts, concludes with an unexpected cut to the truculent voices of the gang, and the lovers' idyll "One Hand, One Heart" is then violently shattered by a reprise of "Tonight." The "rumble" or gang battle is galvanically shot, with the fighting youngsters eventually fleeing the cops in a lightning series of tilted, low-angle shots.
 A great deal of the film was shot in parts of New York City currently in the process of demolition, in addition to the 35 sets that were constructed in the studio. The shooting took six months, with no less than five weeks for exteriors. Interestingly, Irene Sharaff's costumes for the denizens of New York slums cost a great deal. The boys' blue jeans were dyed, redyed and then "distressed" to appear worn, and specially woven with elastic thread to allow for violent movement. This was especially necessary, because the dances are among the most energetic ever seen on film. West Side Story is also one of the few Hollywood musicals that contains elements of social consciousness, particularly the theme of racism, ending with the murder of the hero as a tragic consequence.
- Tokyo, 29 October: Release of Kohayagawa-ke no aki (The End of Summer, aka Early Autumn), directed by Yasujiro Ozu, the tale of a dying patriarch's visit to his former mistress.
- Rome, 18 November:
 The accusation of delinquency is not confined to urban small-time criminals. The writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini has just been arrested for attacking a gas station attendant, in order to steal 2,000 lira from him. The crime cannot be excused as an error of youth. Pasolini is not a teenager nor is he a product of a deprived environment. Born in Bologna in 1922, a descendant of aristocrats, he is the son of a professional soldier. He discovered very young that he had a talent for writing, and his poems have gained the admiration of Alberto Moravia. In three days time, Pasolini's first film as director, Accatone, will be shown to the general public. This work will certainly attract a lot of attention and has already aroused the hatred of the neo-fascists. The director is a committed Marxist.
 - Tokyo, 20 November: Nigen no joken (The Human Condition), the overall title for Masaki Kobayashi's impressive, ambitious and harrowing was trilogy, begun with No Greater Love in 1958, then Road to Eternity the following year, has come to its conclusion with A Soldier's Prayer. It continues the story of the pacifist Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai) who, having been interned in a labor camp after the defeat of Japan in World War II, makes his escape in the snow to get back to his wife (Michiyo Aratama). Director Kobayashi has managed to convey the humanistic message of Jumpei Gomikawa's monumental novel through an almost documentary-like visual treatment, while not neglecting the wider symbolism of the story. The trilogy deals with Japanese war guilt, imperialism, fascism, militarism and, above all, the cruelty that human beings are capable of inflicting upon one another in the name of ideology. The nine hours of The Human Condition make for an unforgettable experience.
- Rome, 23 November:
 Pier Paolo Pasolini, already a well-known novelist, poet, short-story writer and scenarist, has at last made his first feature as a director at the age of 39. Accatone is based on his 1959 novel, in which he drew on his intimate knowledge of sub-proletarian Rome. Accatone is a young pimp from the slums, who takes to thieving after trying to earn an honest living. The film is a brutal and unsentimental view of disillusioned youth, with a cast of non-professionals led by Franco Citti. He plays Accatone with a mixture of lethary and vigor, seeking no sympathy. The use of Bach on the soundtrack ironically counterpoints the sordid world the film portrays. During the premiere of the film this evening, the neo-fascist organization Nuova-Europa caused a violent disturbance, attacking the spectators and vandalizing the movie theater.
- Havana, 1 December: At the inauguration of the Cuban Film Archives in the presence of some of the leading figures in the Castro government, Fidel Castro announced the setting up of a plan to help the cinema industry.
- Paris, 6 December: Release of Tintin et le mystère de la toison d'or (Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece), by Jean-Jacques Vierne, based on the story by Hergé, with Jean-Pierre Talbot in the role of Tintin, and Georges Wilson as Captain Haddock.
 - Los Angeles, 15 December: In Billy Wilder's new comedy, One, Two, Three, James Cagney demonstrates that he has dissipated none of the demonic energy that has driven his long film career. He plays C. R. MacNamara, a Coca-Cola executive in Berlin who fizzes over when his boss' visiting daughter secretly weds a Communist. Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond's script, inspired by a one-act Molnar play, sprays satirical machine-gun bursts in all directions, lambasting Communists and capitalists alike. A hardworking supporting cast includes Horst Buchholz, Pamela Tiffin, Red Buttons and Hubert von Meyerinck as the gloriously named Count von Droste-Schattenberg, a lavatory attendant.
- New York, 15 December:
 In order to make El Cid effective as a grandiose historic fresco, producer Samuel Bronston placed vast resources at the disposal of director Anthony Mann: more than 7,000 extras, a battle fleet of 35 sailing ships, monumental sets and a number of international stars. Bronston also lavished $150,000 on medieval objects and $40,000 on jewelry. As a result, El Cid is a magnificent looking spectacle, with fine photography by Robert Krasker, and superbly staged battle scenes by second unit director Yakima Canutt. To guarantee historical accuracy, the Spanish historian Don Ramon Menendez Pidal was used as a consultant to the screenwriters Philip Yordan and Frederic M. Frank, and to art directors Veniero Colesanti and John Moore. Mostly shot in Spain, the epic 11th-century tale tells of the legendary Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, known as El Cid, who drove the Moors from Spain. Charlton Heston is at his stoical heroic best in the title role, while Sophia Loren is alluring as Chimene, his fiancée. Anthony Mann chased the Italian actress all over Rome to get her to agree to portray the Spanish noblewoman, a role she had turned down twice, saying, "I just don't see myself in the part." Luckily, she was persuaded, as were Raf Vallone and Genevieve Page in supporting roles.
- Paris, 20 December: Release of Walt Disney's animated feature One Hundred and One Dalmations.
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6 May - Lexington, KY,