- Algiers, 9 January: Authorities have decided to create an office for Algerian News under the control of director Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina.
- Tokyo, 13 January:
 Kon Ichikawa, who began his career in cartoon and puppet films, uses some of these skills to conjure up the world of the Kabuki theater in his latest film, Yukinojo henge (An Actor's Revenge). It tells of how an onnagata (female impersonator) during the early 19th century takes revenge on the three men who caused the death of his parents. The veteran actor Kazuo Hasegawa not only gives an extraordinary performance as the hero-heroine, but also portrays a daring bandit in the complex subplot. The Daieiscope screen is brilliantly used in this fascinating and ambiguous study of opposites.
 - Paris, 25 January: Following the example of Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Claude Chabrol has tackled a similar tale of a multiple murderer with cynicism and black humor. Entltled Landru, it recounts the true story of the notorious Henri Désiré Landru, who charmed a number of unsuspecting women, and then killed them. Charles Denner, with bald dome, bushy eyebrows and black beard, gives a strong performance in the title role, supported by a starry female cast, including Michèle Morgan, Danielle Darrieux, Hildegard Knef and Stéphane Audran. Yet critics have expressed disapproval, particularly of Françoise Sagan's awkward dialogue.
- New York, 6 February: According to Variety, Fox has received advances of $8.35 million from exhibitors for Cleopatra.
- Rome, 25 February:
 People have been puzzled by the title of Federico Fellini's new film, 8½ (Otto e mezzo), until it was explained by the director. As the picture is semi-autobiographical, Fellini has added up his seven solo features plus three collaborations, counting a half each, to get the title. The film attempts as few others have done to enter the mind of an artist (in this case a movie director) and explain the creative process. Marcello Mastroianni, in a thinly-veiled portrait of Fellini, is unable to fine the inspiration for his next film. Having been immensely successful with his last picture, he is harried by his producer (Guido Alberti), his wife (Anouk Aimée) and his mistress (Sandra Milo) to get started on a new one. Needing rest, he goes off to a spa, where he retreats into personal recollections, dreams and fantasies. He remembers his dead mother and father, an obese hooker on a beach, his Catholic school, and has an erotic wishful fantasy that involves his controlling a horde of beautiful women with a whip. In reality, he is forced to examine his relationship with the women in his life, including an actress (Claudia Cardinale), whom he believes personifies every woman he has ever dreamed of. The finale has everyone in his life, living and dead, joining hands in a circus parade. In 8½, Fellini has not only produced a cogent statement about the nature of inspiration and creativity, but has also made a sharp comment on a selfish and superficial society. In addition, it is visually stunning, exhilarating and constantly surprising, underlined by the evocative qualities of the Nino Rota score.
- Paris, 1 March: Release of Jacques Demy's La Baie des anges (Bay of Angels), starring Jeanne Moreau and Claude Mann.
 - Rome, 1 March: Pier Paolo Pasolini is not only the bête noir of the neo-fascists, but also of the Church. La Ricotta, the sketch he directed for the film RoGoPaG (the title made up from the names of the four directors involved: Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini and Gregoretti), has got him into trouble for undermining the state religion. Pasolini's film is a vigorous satire on the contrast between the Christian message and those who propagate it. Laura Betti portrays the Virgin Mary, with Orson Welles as a director making a religious epic, during which a simple man dies on the cross. His death is due to overeating at a feast which includes ricotta, the white cheese that gives the story its title. Pasolini's only crime seems to be that he has denounced those who vulgarize religion.
- New York, 26 March: 20th Century-Fox shares are now at $29 compared to $25 in June 1962 before Darryl F. Zanuck took over.
- Rome, 27 March:
 Only Luchino Visconti's ninth film in almost 20 years, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) seems destined to become his biggest success. Previously, each of his pictures divided opinion sharply. Some criticized the "father of neo-realism" for making a period piece such as Senso (1954), but when Visconti returned to his own epoch with the realistic Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960), he unleashed a scandal. The premiere of Il Gattopardo resembled a reconciliatory high mass. This gorgeous evocation of the era of the Risorgimento, which was faithfully adapted from Giuseppe De Lampedasa's 1958 novel, is full of set pieces, particularly the final ball that takes up to 40 minutes of screen time. In order to get 20th Century-Fox to release the film internationally, Visconti had to agree to cast Burt Lancaster in the role of the Prince of Salina, the dying 19th-century Sicilian aristocrat. Lancaster delivers a rich performance while Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale make an attractive young couple. "We are the leopards, after us the jackals will come," comments the Prince sadly, a phrase that probably express the aristocratic director and co-screenplay adaptor's feelings.
 - New York, 29 March: The stuffed birds that loom over Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960) have proved strangely prophetic. In Alfred Hitchcock's latest, The Birds, they have come alive with a vengeance, swarming in their tens of thousands to terrorize the inhabitants of a small community north of San Francisco. Says Hitch, "They are the victims of Judgment Day. I felt that after Psycho people would expect something to top it." Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren are the stars battling the winged terror, which presented Hitchcock's special effects team with an enormous technical challenge. They tackled it with a combination of rear projection, animation and lifelike mechanical birds. However, for the scene in which Hedren is trapped in a room by a swarm of feathered enemies, real birds were attached to her body. Hitchcock, who notoriously likes to put his "ice maiden" leading ladies through several kinds of hell, was reportedly extremely pleased with the results of this scene. Hedren was less enthusiastic about the ordeal. The Birds reunites Hitchcock with Daphne du Maurier 23 years after Rebecca. Evan Hunter's spare script has been loosely adapted from one of her stories. It daringly uses the device of a science fiction apocalypse to underline the intriguing sexual and emotional insecurity radiated by the cool leading lady.
- Los Angeles, 4 April: The director Jean Renoir has been made Doctor honoris causa of the University of Southern California.
- Hollywood, 8 April:
 Two blockbusters, David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia and Darryl F. Zanuck's The Longest Day were vying for the Best Picture award at this year's Oscar® ceremony. The prize went to Lawrence of Arabia, with Lean picking up the Best Director award. The other major awards were spread among more intimate films. Gregory Peck deservedly won the Best Actor award for his performance as a quietly spoken Southern lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird. Anne Bancroft was voted Best Actress for The Miracle Worker, repeating her stage success as Annie Sullivan, the teacher battling with Patty Duke's blind-deaf Helen Keller. Bancroft's performance, a brilliant dramatization of the struggle between liberty and discipline, has brought her back to Hollywood after a gap of five years in which she established herself as a formidable stage actress. Patty Duke won the Best Supporting Actress award, and Ed Begley was name Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the corrupt Southern town "boss" out to fix movie star Paul Newman in Sweet Bird of Youth. Two new categories were created by the Academy Board of Governors to replace the Special Effects Award: Special Visual Effects and Sound Effects. Emil Kosa Jr. won the visual effects award for Cleopatra, while the award for sound effects went to Walter G. Elliott for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
- Madrid, 8 May: New censorship norms are to be introduced. To a certain extent, they will ease the restrictions that have been in force since the civil war.
- Rome, 11 May: The affair of La Ricotta, the satiric sketch in RoGoPaG that has been deemed blasphemous, has turned bitter for Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed and wrote it. He lost the court case last month, about 12 days after the release of the collective film. The controversial director was found guilty of "public defamation" and has received a four months suspended prison sentence.
- Los Angeles, 22 May:
 Paul Newman plays a cynical womanizing cowboy in Martin Ritt's bleak contemporary Western, Hud. Newman's Hud is strictly a Cadillac cowpuncher and the despair of his father, Melvyn Douglas, a man who passionately loves the harsh Texas landscape. Brandon de Wilde plays Hud's nephew, uncertain whether to follow the uncle he worships or the old man he respects; and Patricia Neal (superb) the housekeeper who suffers at Hud's hands. Things come to a head when Douglas' herd contracts hoof and mouth disease, he dies, and De Wilde takes off for a new life, leaving an unconcerned Hud, a man of straw, presiding over a ranch that has become a physical and moral wasteland.
- Paris, 5 June: Opening of the Cinémathèque's new cinema at the Palais de Chaillot. An homage to Charles Chaplin was followed by a retrospective of American and Japanese films.
 - New York, 12 June: The long-awaited premiere of Cleopatra is finally taking place at the Rivoli Theater in New York. Walter Wanger's gigantic production cost 20th Century-Fox $40 million. This was due to the sumptuous sets, the 26,000 costumes... but mainly to the innumerable difficulties during its making. On 30 September 1960, Rouben Mamoulian started filming at Pinewood Studios in England with Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Finch (as Caesar) and Stephen Boyd (as Anthony). Taylor was being paid $1 million against 10 percent of the gross, making her the highest paid performer in the history of Hollywood. However, she hardly appeared on set for over a month. First she was stricken with a cold, then a fever, then an infected tooth. In March 1961, she was rushed to the London Clinic with lung congestion. Shooting was suspended and Mamoulian, Finch and Boyd left the film. Joseph L. Mankiewicz was hired to take over at the helm, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton joined the cast, and the entire production was shipped from the cold of England to sunny Rome. Cleopatra had already cost $7 million for seven minutes of film. The beautiful star arrived in Italy with a sizeable entourage consisting of one husband (Eddie Fisher), three children, five dogs, two cats, various accessories and dozens of servants, and installed herself in a 14-room mansion. It was soon evident that Taylor and Burton were attracted to one another, and the studio publicists played it up for all it was worth. After all, it was a multi-million dollar production, about one of the world's greatest love stories. Now audiences can see how the love that was the talk of modern Rome compares with that of ancient Rome.
- Los Angeles, 18 June:
 Mexican actor Pedro Armendáriz has shot himself through the heart after learning that he had cancer. He knew that he was condemned to death, and refused to simply waste away. Armendáriz was born in Mexico on 9 May 1912 and studied in San Antonio, Texas, and at the California Polytechnic Institute. After working for a Mexican railroad company and at a hotel, he had a brief stage career befoe making his big screen debut in 1935 in his homeland. He rapidly became Mexico's top film star, appearing in around 45 motion pictures, many directed by Emilio Fernandez, the most famous of those being Maria Calandéria (1943) and The Black Pearl (1946). He later starred in Luis Buñuel's The Brute (1952). Armendáriz made three films with John Ford -- The Fugitive (1947, shot in Mexico), Fort Apache (1948) and Three Godfathers (1949). His last screen appearance was in the new James Bond movie, From Russia With Love.
- Brazil, 18 June: The filmmaker Glauber Rocha has started shooting his film Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God White Devil).
- Los Angeles, 25 June: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has accused film studios of racial discrimination. As an example, there is not a single black actor in the film The Longest Day, even though 1,700 black soldiers took part in the D-Day Normandy landings.
- Paris, 26 June: First day of shooting for La Tulipe noire (The Black Tulip). Christian-Jaque directs, Alain Delon stars.
 - Hollywood, 18 July: With The Nutty Professor, his fourth film as director, Jerry Lewis has become a true auteur; he is not only the screenwriter (with Bill Richmond) and director, but also the star, and plays a double role. This parody of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde takes place in an American college where Lewis is a bespectacled absent-minded professor of chemistry. Because he is unable to gain the attention of the lovely girl (Stella Stevens) to whom he is attracted, he concocts a potion in the laboratory that temporarily transforms him into a handsome, debonair, swinging playboy. In fact, Lewis/Jeckyl turns himself into a man who bears a truly striking resemblance to Dean Martin/Mr. Hyde, his former screen partner. This wicked take-off of an egocentric, lazy crooner has a further edge to it, because the team had split up acrimoniously. It is also a hilarious demonstration that inside every Jerry Lewis is a Dean Martin trying to get out, and highlights Lewis' Jeckyl-and-Hyde personality. Lewis also satirizes certain aspects of the American Way of Life. The film is full of visual and sound gags learned from his mentor Frank Tashlin, who directed two of the last Martin and Lewis films, as well as a couple of Lewis' early solo efforts. It was Tashlin who persuaded Lewis to direct his own films, the first of which was The Bellboy (1960), followed by The Ladies' Man and The Errand Boy (both 1961), sufficient to prove that he is not only a talented comedian, but a director of comic verve.
- New York, 8 August: Release of The Great Escape, a World War II film directed by John Sturges and starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough and Charles Bronson.
- Hollywood, 14 August: Dramatist and screenwriter Clifford Odets has died.
- Hollywood, 20 August: A meeting between representatives of the NAACP and producers, about the employment of black actors in the film industry, has resulted in a quota agreement.
- Rio de Janiero, 24 August: Nelson Pereira dos Santos has held a preview of Vidas Secas (Barren Lives), adapted from the novel by Graciliano Ramos. The film evokes the plight of the poor farmers from the Northeast with a documentary-style realism, and is already being hailed by critics as the symbol of the Cinema Novo in Brazil.
- New York, 10 September: For the first New York Film Festival, 31 films are being screened at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.
- New York, 11 September: New York's first film festival opened last night at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, with a screening of Luis Buñuel's El Ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel).
- New York, 12 September: Samuel Fuller today held a preview of his film Shock Corridor, starring Peter Breck, Constance Towers and Gene Evans, about a journalist investigating a murder in an asylum.
- Stockholm, 23 September:
 Ingmar Bergman began his angst-ridden, intimist trilogy with Såsom i en spegel (Through a Glass Darkly) in 1961, followed by Nattvardsgästerne (Winter Light) last year. It has now been completed with Tystnaden (The Silence), the title of which could sum up Bergman's bleak philosophy -- "God has never spoken, because He does not exist." Tystnaden centers on Ester (Ingrid Thulin) physically attracted to her sister Anna (Gunner Lindblom), herself a sexually vibrant mother of 10-year-old Johan (Jörgen Lindström). This dark, passionate and elusive film, impeccably interpreted, is perhaps even better than its two predecessors.
 - New York, 1 October: Sidney Poitier's abundant charm and deft handling of comedy enable him to negotiate a minefield of sentimentality in Lilies of the Field, in which he plays the handyman who teaches English to a group of five Eastern European nuns and helps them build a chapel in the Arizona desert. Writer James Poe and producer-director Ralph Nelson, who also joins the cast of the film, expound the messages of Christian unity and racial harmony with an unselfconscious directness that looks set to pay dividends at the box office. In the era of the blockbuster, small is sometimes more profitable.
- New York, 7 October:
 Director Tony Richardson has cast aside British cinema's recent preoccupation with gritty realism to produce a freewheeling adaptation of Tom Jones, Henry Fielding's picaresque 18th-century novel. Shot entirely on location, the film stars Albert Finney as the eponymous hero, whose bawdy adventures burst from the screen with all the red-faced vigor of a Hogarth cartoon. And Richardson maintains the pace with a battery of tricks from freeze-frames to speeded-up chases. The entire production is perfectly underscored by John Addison's harpsichord music. Outstanding in a superb supporting cast are Hugh Griffith as the buccolic Squire Western, squatting in the mud to test the size of his prize bull's testicles; and Dame Edith Evans playing his haughty sister who rebukes an importunate highwayman with the words, "Stand and deliver? I am no traveling midwife!"
 - London, 10 October: Bond mania is beginning to break out as Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli consolidate the success of Dr. No with From Russia With Love, the 007 adventure that is one of President Kennedy's favorite books. Istanbul and Venice form the backdrops to Bond's deadly battle with the forces of SPECTRE, the Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, who are chasing a top-secret Soviet coding machine. Sean Connery is in admirably laconic form as 007, spotting the stony-faced SPECTRE agent Robert Shaw as a wrong 'un when the latter orders red wine with fish on the Orient Express. Connery's other principal adversary is Lotte Lenya's ferociously frumpy SPECTRE operative Rosa Klebb, whose sensible shoes come armed with poison-tipped spikes. Even as Bond romances a stunning Soviet defector (Daniela Bianchi), he realizes he is being lured into a deadly trap, and he will need all of his courage, ability and cutting-edge technology to triumph over the forces that seek to destroy him.
- Paris, 11 October:
 Close friends Jean Cocteau and Edith Piaf died within a few hours of each other today. A few days ago, the poet had found the strength to joke with the singer about their respective conditions. "Our doctors don't understand anything. They see us dead, and then revive us." This time, alas, the man whose light flickered at the end of The Testament of Orpheus will not rise again. One cannot convince oneself that he had "pretended to die" as he had at the climax of that film. He knew full well that he would never direct again. The financial difficulties he had suffered during The Testament convinced him to make it his last. Cocteau's farewell to the cinema was his faithful adaptation of the novel from Madame de La Fayette, The Princess of Cleves, for Jean Delannoy in March 1961.
- Hollywood, 17 October: Under the terms of a new agreement, Frank Sinatra now owns one-third of the Warner Bros. Record Company. Sinatra has announced his intention to devote himself entirely to artistic activities and to give up his questionable interests in the gambling industry.
- Hollywood, 20 October: The Screen Actors Guild and other unions are accusing producers of trying to obstruct a Congressional inquiry into the recently growing trend of making films overseas.
- Hollywood, 4 November: For the launching of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, producer-director Stanley Kramer and United Artists, his distributor, are organizing the most expensive press reception in the history of the film industry. Two hundred fifty reporters from 26 countries have been invited for four days of festivities at a cost of $250,000.
 - Los Angeles, 7 November: The cinema's current obsession with size has now invaded the world of comedy. Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, filmed in Ultra Panavision for United Artists, boasts a colossal comedy roster -- Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Phil Silvers, Dick Shawn, Terry-Thomas, William Demarest, Buddy Hackett, Mickey Rooney, Buster Keaton, the Three Stooges, Joe E. Brown and Jimmy Durante. When crook Durante dies, the race is on for his cache of bank loot under the watchful eye of police chief Spencer Tracy. It's an excuse for an explosion of stunts that involved nearly every stuntman in Hollywood. As stunt coordinator Carey Loftin claims, "You name a stunt we did it -- in airplanes, automobiles, tractors, trucks, fire engines... fisticuffs, fireworks, falls from fire escapes, ladders, palm trees and buidling tops."
- Hollywood, 25 November: All film studios closed today as a mark of respect to the late President John F. Kennedy, assassinated three days ago.
- New York, 1 December: In reply to the accusations made by the unions, Eric Johnston, the president of the MPAA, has declared that the film industry would be unable to survive without making a percentage of its films overseas, where costs are considerably lower.
- New York, 4 December: MGM has announced that its films will no longer be released under the exclusive rights system but under the Showcase system recently launched by Fox and United Artists: the film is shown simultaneously at 20 or so movie theaters in each major city.
- New York, 5 December:
 With Charade, the director Stanley Donen has achieved the magic pairing that everybody wanted to see: Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. No matter that (as so often with Audrey and her leading men) there is a 27-year age difference between them. Grant is a very fit and attractive man, and a scintillating screenplay uses the age gap to advantage. Made on location in Paris, with Hepburn again eye-catchingly clothed by Givenchy, this is a high-octane, high-definition romantic comedy-thriller. The complicated plot centers on the plight of Reggie Lampert, wife of a wealthy Paris-based businessman, who returns from a trip to find her husband mysteriously murdered. Enter a trio of richly characterized villains (James Coburn, Ned Glass, George Kennedy), an American diplomat (Walter Matthau) -- and Cary Grant. The leads sparkle, she insouciant and vulnerable, he debonair and charming. A winner to close out the year.
- Los Angeles, 11 December: Frank Sinatra's son Frank Sinatra Jr., who was kidnapped on 9 December, has been released after the payment of a $240,000 ransom.
 - Tokyo, 12 December: The great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu has just died of cancer on the eve of his 60th birthday. His death comes shortly after the death of his mother, with whom he had always lived, never having married. Born in Tokyo, the son of a cattle feed salesman, Ozu was taken on as assistant cameraman at the Shochiku studios in 1922. By 1927, he had been promoted to director, his first film being Zange no yaiba (Sword of Penitence), based on an idea by Kogo Noda, who became his resident screenwriter right up to the end. Most of his early films were American-style comedies based on the Japanese way of life, such as Daigaku wa deta karedo (I Graduated But...) (1929) or social comedies such as the delightful Otona no miru ehon - Umarete wa mita keredo (I Was Born But...) (1932). As late as 1936 Oza made his first sound film, Hitori musuko (The Only Son), which also marks the beginning of his special interest in middle-class domestic drama, retaining few traces of the comic characterizations found in his splendid earlier comedies. In exploring Japanese family life and the relationships between the generations, Ozu continued to make use of a restrained and simple style and a static camera placed at a low angle, turning out such post-war masterpieces as Banshun (Late Spring) (1949), Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story) (1953) and Sanma no aji (An Autumn Afternoon).
- New York, 16 December:
 Director Elia Kazan has returned to his immigrant roots with America, America, based on his 1962 novel, in which he depicts with reflective warmth the trials and tribulations of his own uncle's odyssey from Turkey to the United States. Kazan himself was born Elia Kazanjoglou in Istanbul in 1909, and was taken to America by his parents in 1913. The immigrant experience in the New World is wrapped up in this absorbing two-and-a-half hour film superbly photographed by Haskell Wexler. A graduate of the Group Theater, which he joined in 1932, Kazan directed his first movie, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, in 1945 and thereafter has divided his time between Hollywood and influential theater work. Briefly a Communist in the 1930s, in 1952 he disclosed the names of fellow-Communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee. This secured his future in Hollywood, and the disrespect of his more loyal peers.
 - Paris, 20 December: In his most recent film, Le Mépris (Contempt), Jean-Luc Godard has slyly used Alberto Moravia's novel Il Disprezzo to make his own sharp comment on international filmmaking, by using color, wide-screen and a multinational cast. The first third of the movie, shot in Italy, is concerned with the breakdown of a marriage, made in a remarkable flowing sequence set in the apartment of a couple superbly played by Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. The latter is a screenwriter increasingly despised by his wife as he tries to set up a film in Rome of The Odyssey with an American producer (Jack Palance) and directed by Fritz Lang (who plays himself). Godard has explained that he had wanted to make a film by Michelangelo Antonioni, in the style of Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock!
- Prague, 20 December: Press preview of Vera Chytilova's first full-length film O Necem Jinem (Something Else). The film's loose framework and spontaneous style are reminiscent of the cinéma-vérité.
- Italy, 31 December: Over the last year, 32 magazine covers were devoted to Claudia Cardinale, 30 to Sophia Loren and 11 to Gina Lollobrigida.
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14 January - Atlanta, GA,