- Moscow, 1 January: The Selected Works of Eisenstein, a collection of articles and essays by the director, have been published in six volumes under the editorship of Serge Yurkevitch.
- Hollywood, 27 January: Director Norman Z. McLeod has died. McLeod started his career in 1927 as assistant director on Wings, but was best known for his wonderful comedies, notably the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932), W. C. Fields' It's a Gift (1934), the "Topper" films, Danny Kaye's The Kid from Brooklyn (1946) and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and Bob Hope's The Paleface (1948).
- Palm Springs, 29 January: Alan Ladd, whose memorable films include Blue Dahlia (1946) and Shane (1953), has apparently committed suicide.
- New York, 31 January:
 Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb has a long title and a brutal message: If it is not controlled, the technology we have created will destroy us. Here, it's the Soviet Doomsday machine which, once triggered, moves relentlessly towards the meltdown of nuclear war. And it is about to be triggered by Sterling Hayden's crazed USAF General Jack D. Ripper, who has launched his own unauthorized preemptive strike against the Russkies. The U.S. President, his metal-clawed, ex-Nazi scientific advisor Dr. Strangelove and a stiff-upper-lipped RAF officer (all brilliantly played by Peter Sellers) are helpless to prevent apocalypse in this savage satire on the mad logic of nuclear strategy.
 - London, 10 February: In Joseph Losey's The Servant, Dirk Bogarde continues to refashion himself as a screen actor. He portrays Barrett, the creepily obsequious manservant hired by languid young aristocrat James Fox to run his newly-acquired Chelsea home. The gentleman's gentleman undermines and then destroys his master. Adapted by Harold Pinter for a 1948 novella by Robin Maugham, The Servant is a superbly nuanced examination of the tensions, evasions and deceit that infest the British class system. Bogarde and Fox are superbly matched protagonists, well supported by Sarah Miles as the predatory waif, infiltrated into Fox's house by Bogarde as Pinter's contest of seduction and dictatorship moves to its bleak conclusion.
- New York, 19 February: Paramount has sold the television rights of 200 full-length films made prior to 1948 to NBC. The cost of the transaction was sixty million dollars.
- Paris, 4 March:
 After Jean Renoir's film version of Octave Mirbeau's novel Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid), made in Hollywood in 1946, Luis Buñuel has now tackled the same subject. As might be expected, given the differences between the two directors, Buñuel's adaptation is black and cynical while Renoir's is shining and optimistic. Nor is there any foot fetishism or sexual activity present in the less acid and lighter earlier film. Buñuel and his screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière have transposed the plot to the end of the 1920s, the epoch during the Spanish director's first sojourn in France, when he made his first two films. By updating the story and making the sadistic valet Joseph (Georges Géret) a member of the French Fascist party, Buñuel has brought the social satire into sharper focus. At the end, the Fascists shout "Vivre Chiappe," referring to the Paris police chief who had supressed L'Age d'or in 1930. Jean Moreau plays Célestine, who takes up a post as chambermaid to a bourgeois, provincial family, and becomes the catalyst that reveals their sexual, religious and social repressions. Moreau -- sexy, cruel and cool -- is unscrupulous enough to be like Joseph, whose petit bourgeois ambitions she shares, and with whom she ends up.
- New York, 12 March: Having been arrested for publicly showing Jack Smith's underground film, Flaming Creatures, the cinema-lover and film critic Jonas Mekas declared: "We refuse all censorsip of art." He wants to found a New York League for sexual liberty.
- Hollywood, 18 March: MGM producer Martin Ransohoff has called upon the MPAA to end its ban on nudity in films as part of sweeping changes being made to Hollywood's voluntary censorship code. He feels the code should not be a matter of "specific rules," but that it should "consider the intent of the producer and the content of the film." Ransohoff's latest film, The Americanization of Emily, had to be made without the nude scenes called for in Paddy Chayefsky's script, to gain a seal of approval.
 - Hollywood, 13 April: Tom Jones, Tony Richardson's 18th-century romp, has walked away with four Oscars®: Best Picture, Director, Screenplay (John Osborne) and Score (John Addison). It's clear that Tom Jones marks a watershed in the British cinema, creating an extravagant world perfectly in tune with that of "Swinging London." Sidney Poitier was voted Best Actor for his performance in Lilies of the Field, becoming the first black performer to win an Oscar® for a leading role. Patricia Neal scooped the Best Actress prize for Hud, in which she played the overworked but immensely sexy housekeeper on Paul Newman's dusty Texas ranch. The Best Supporting Actor award went to Melvyn Douglas for his performance as the grizzled patriarch in the same film; and Dame Margaret Rutherford romped in as Best Supporting Actress for The V.I.P.'s, in which she played a charmingly querulous airline passenger.
- Prague, 17 April: Release of Czech filmmaker Milos Forman's first full-length feature Cerny Petr.
- Paris, 22 April: Release of Abel Gance's new film, Cyrano and d'Artagnan, which drew on the works by Edmund Rostand and Alexandre Dumas. The critics' reaction has been unenthusiastic.
- Hollywood, 27 April: William Wyler asserted today that many of the hightly acclaimed European New Wave films did little more than confuse. He pointed out that there was a difference between "the artistic and the arty, between the subtle and the incomprehensible." Federico Fellini's La Dolce vita was, however, "a great, great film... it had something to say and was clearly artistic."
- Rome, 30 April: Twenty-four "spaghetti westerns" have been made since the beginning of July 1963.
 - Cannes, 14 May:
 This year at the Cannes Film Festival, the jury, presided over by Fritz Lang, has given the Grand Prize, which replaces the Golden Palm, to Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). Demy seems to be the only French director interested in making film musicals. However, he has gone even further than the traditional musical, because the words are sung throughout, without any spoken dialogue. Demy had hoped to start shooting in September 1962, but due to the film's originality, he had difficulties in getting it made. It was worth all the effort, because he and the composer Michel Legrand have carried it off with aplomb. The plot tells of Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve), who works in her widowed mother's umbrella shop, in love with Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), a garage mechanic. She discovers that she is pregnant when he goes away on military service, so she marries a young diamond merchant (Marc Michel) for security. Filming in color for the first time, Demy had both the exterior and interior of houses in Cherbourg painted in an array of colors, matching the clothes of the characters. As unusual in a very different way from Les Parapluies was the Special Jury Prize winner, Hiroshi Teshigahara's Suno no onna (Woman of the Dunes). An audacious erotic fable, much of it takes place at the bottom of a huge sandpit where an entomologist searching for insects in the desert is trapped with a woman who lives in an old house.
- Paris, 20 May:
 After the triumph of Jules et Jim three years ago, François Truffaut has followed it with another triangle story, this time, as the director explained, "a violent answer to Jules et Jim... a truly modern love; it takes place in planes, elevators; it has all the harassments of modern life." La Peau douce (The Soft Skin) came from a newspaper report of an incident that occurred in a full restaurant when a woman entered and shot her husband with a hunting rifle. Truffaut then set about inventing a story to explain the circumstances that led to this actual event. The film tells of a married, middle-aged editor of a literary magazine (Jean Desailly), who falls in love with an air stewardess (Françoise Dorléac) while on a trip to Lisbon, and leaves his wife (Nelly Benedetti) for her. When his lover rejects him, he seeks reconciliation with his wife, who shoots him in a restaurant. The name of the protagonist, Pierre Lachenay, is the nom-de-plume under which Truffaut wrote some of his articles for Cahiers du Cinéma. This is but a small indication that The Soft Skin is a very personal film, in which the critic Georges Sadoul rediscovered the "raw sensitivity" of The Four Hundred Blows. Truffaut has deliberately made sure that Lachenay would not win the audience's sympathy, so, like its title, the film has a brilliant surface, but, despite patches of warmth and wit, is uncharacteristically cool.
 - New York, 1 June: After threatening Tippi Hedren with death by pecking in The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock has turned her into a traumatized, man-hating kleptomaniac in Marnie. Sean Connery, making his American debut, is the suave naturalist-cum-businessman who sets out to tame this exotic creature and unlock the secrets of her past. Hitchcock originally offered the title role to Grace Kelly, hoping to entice her out of royal retirement in Monaco, but Hedren proves to be rather more than second best, bringing insight and pathos to the sexually inhibited thief in a film that tells us much about the director's own view of his troubled heroine's psychopathology.
- Algiers, 8 June:
 Born in the midst of the war of liberation against the French seven years ago, the Algerian film industry is in the process of strengthening itself institutionally, thanks to a series of laws and measures taken by the government in the new Algerian Republic. After the creation of the Department of Algerian Information last year, the Center of Algerian Cinema has now been inaugurated in Algiers. The purpose of this organization is to stimulate various cinematic activities, significantly in the realms of production, distribution and presentation. A nationalized body, the Center has been conceived within a Socialist framework, the government intending to oversee all aspects of cinematographic activity. A lack of technical equipment and training facilities has been a factor in inhibiting the growth of the Algerian cinema, considered among the most healthy and promising of the young North African film industries. Among this country's best films has been Les Oliviers de la justice (The Olive Trees of Justice), released in 1962.
 - New York, 24 June: The success of The Pink Panther has created a new comic favorite in the accident-prone from of Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau. A sequel was inevitable, and it has arrived in the shape of A Shot in the Dark, again directed by Blake Edwards, in which the magnificently maladroit Clouseau lurches towards the solution of a murder mystery adapted from plays by Harry Kurnitz and Marcel Achard. In trying to clear Elke Sommer of the crime, Clouseau leaves a trail of additional bodies in his wake before finding that all is revealed in a nudist camp. "Give me ten men like Clouseau and I could destroy the world," blurts his bewildered boss Herbert Lom.
- New York, 5 July: Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, a failure 17 years ago, is a hit revival. The film opened last Friday as part of a Chaplin Festival at the Plaza Theater on East 58th Street, and grossed a total of $13,500 over the three-day holiday weekend.
- London, 6 July: The premiere of Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night caused a huge traffic jam in Piccadilly. Thousands of fans had turned up hoping to catch a glimpse of The Beatles.
- New York, 21 July: The Irish playwright Samuel Beckett has started shooting a film with Buster Keaton, based on three short pieces written by himself, Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco.
- London, 1 August: Release of Goldfinger, made by Guy Hamilton and again starring Sean Connery. This is the third James Bond film based on Ian Fleming's novels. The title song, recorded by Shirley Bassey, is already in the charts.
- Paris, 3 August: Le Figaro has published a long interview with Alain Delon explaining why he is suing a journalist from the Herald Tribune. It appears the latter had twisted his words "in order to make (him) appear a doubly stupid cretin, a churlish boor, a fathead reeking of hollow pretensions only good enough to be locked away in the nearest padded cell."
- New York, 5 August: Actress Anne Bancroft, who won the Best Actress Award last year for The Miracle Worker, has married comedy writer Mel Brooks.
 - London, 31 August: At the height of Beatlemania, A Hard Day's Night brings the pop group to an even wider public. The almost plotless script suits the anarchic personalities of The Beatles (George Harrison, Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Ringo Starr) who play themselves. It follows the Fab Four as, hotly pursued by fans, they board a train from Liverpool to London where they are to do a TV show. In London, they keep disappearing during rehearsals to the annoyance of their harassed manager and a fussy TV director. But all ends well with the show. The group sing many of their greatest hits, including the title song and "Can't Buy Me Love," during which they are seen cavorting in a field forming patterns, filmed from a helicopter. American director Richard Lester places other numbers in various unlikely settings, and uses jump cuts and speeded up action to create a frantic pace that should please the Beatles' older fans as well as their youthful ones.
- Venice, 10 September:
 The Venice Film Festival has often been accused of timidity in its prizegiving, but this year they jury can be congratulated for its courage. A week ago, neo-fascislt organizations disturbed the showing of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew). This did not prevent the film from being awarded the Special Jury Prize. Despite Pasolini's claim to have broken away from Christianity, he has treated this religious subject with respect, humanity and energy. After he had been accused of blasphemy over his sketch in RoGoPaG two years ago, Pasolini has now been forgiven by the Catholic Church, who helped finance the film. Applying neo-realist methods, the director shot this version of the life of Christ in Calabria, using the expressive faces of non-professionals. The Golden Lion was presented to Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Deserto rosso (The Red Desert), his first film in color. Deep reds and greens reflect the neurosis of a wife (Monica Vitti) having an affair with her husband's best friend, while brighter colors appear during her flights into fantasy. With the two Italian films gaining the most attention in Venice this year, Britain could be pleased with Tom Courtenay's best actor prize for King and Country.
 - Peking: The time seems to have come for the Chinese cinema to remake itself, as has already been achieved in the theater under the ægis of Chiang Quing, Mao's wife, where the classical repertoire has been has been progressively abandoned. In December 1963, Mao fumed, "In numerous fields, Socialist transformation has produced only minimal results, those of a bygone age continue to reign supreme." Last February, in the People's Daily, Mao stated, "The whole country must be re-educated by the Popular Army of Liberation." This has now become law, and the meaning of culture has been redefined. "Many writers, playwrights and directors have not followed the Party line. They have slid on the slippery slopes of revisionism," Mao has said. From now on, ideological changes will affect the motion picture industry, which now produces about 480 features annually.
- New York, 25 September:
 Disney's delightful musical comedy Mary Poppins, directed by the ever-reliable Robert Stevenson, is calculated to appeal to children of all ages. After the disappointment of not landing the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, a role that she originated on Broadway, Julie Andrews makes a spectacular movie debut as P. L. Travers' "practically perfect" Edwardian nanny, who delights her young charges and grown-ups Glynis Johns and David Tomlinson in equal measure. Dick Van Dyke co-stars as the tuneful handyman Bert, and there's movie magic aplenty as every technical resource at Disney's disposal is used to combine live action with animation, whisking the co-stars over the rooftops of London with assorted chimneysweeps and enabling Van Dyke to cut a caper with some penguins. Other highlights include "A Spoonful of Sugar," "Feed the Birds," the tongue-twisting "Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious" song, and Van Dyke's rendition of "Chim-Chim-Cheree."
- France, 27 September: The German film about the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, Olympiad, directed by Leni Riefenstahl during the Nazi era, has been shown here on television for the first time.
 - London, 30 September: Now aged 75, Charles Chaplin has been a resident of Switzerland, at his home in Corsier-sur-Vevy near Lausanne, since 1953. And it is in Britain, the country of his birth, that he has decided to publish the fascinating story of his life titled My Autobiography. The book has been four years in preparation and runs to over 500 pages. The first third, which takes him to the beginning of 1916, is especially vivid, not least when describing Chaplin's unhappy childhood. But thereafter he seems keener to talk about his social life and the celebrities he met than to reveal the secrets of his filmmaking art. Many of his surviving collaborators are reported to be hurt by his failure to acknowledge their roles. One of those, Robert Florey, who was Chaplin's associate director on Monsieur Verdoux, has expressed his disapproval in a review of the French edition, titled Histoire de ma vie, in Paris-Match.
- Mumbai, 10 October:
 Sensitive and tormented, resembling many of the characters he played in his own films and in those directed by others, the Indian director and actor Guru Dutt has committed suicide at the age of 39. Born in Bangalore, Dutt studied at Uday Shankar's academy of art, before entering the cinema in 1951, the year he shot his first film, Baazi (A Game of Chance). He made seven other pictures, of which two are masterpieces, Pyassa (Eternal Thirst) (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers) (1959). Dutt reconciled the traditions of popular Indian cinema with more demanding fare, thus paving the way for younger directors.
- Paris, 13 October: British director Clive Donner has started shooting What's New, Pussycat? in the Billancourt studios. The stars of the film are Ursula Andress, Peter O'Toole, Peter Sellers and Romy Schneider, while its scriptwriter, the American director-actor Woody Allen, plays a character role.
- Los Angeles, 16 October: Composer and lyricist Cole Porter has died. The celebrated songwriter composed numerous hits for both Broadway and Hollywood musicals including his unforgettable "Night and Day."
 - New York, 21 October: Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's long-running stage musical, My Fair Lady, finally reaches the screen, with Rex Harrison rpeating his London and Broadway performance as Shaw's Professor Higgins, who, for a bet, turns a guttersnipe into a "lady." However, English rose Julie Andrews, a fine soprano but unknown to movie audiences, is replaced by one of the world's most loved film stars, Audrey Hepburn who, her tremulous and appealing delivery of "Moon River" in Breakfast at Tiffany's notwithstanding, can barely sing a note.
Jack L. Warner, last of the old-style moguls, has staked much on this lavish production. Determined to acquire the rights after seeing the Broadway show at its 1956 opeining, it took him several years to clinch a deal that cost a massive $5.5 million for the rights alone. Preparation was dogged with problems. Warner wanted Peter O'Toole and, when that idea foundered, Cary Grant -- who, wisely, said that Harrison was the only possible choice. Then Lerner, unable to persuade Warner to cast Andrews, was left angry and disappointed at the choice of Hepburn, who Warner regarded as the surefire security for his investment. For her part, Hepburn was reportedly thrilled to get the role (and a $1 million paycheck) and was confident that she could learn to sing it. She set about voice lessons with dedication, only to be told, after months of hard work and her songs already recorded, that musical director André Previn had decided to hire Marni Nixon to dub the famous numbers, thus inflicting a bitter blow to Hepburn's professional pride. Warner personally took on the producer role, and chose veteran George Cukor to direct. The darling of screen actresses, Cukor's experience of the musical form has previously been limited to the essentially dramatic remake of A Star Is Born (1954) with Judy Garland. However, the film has retained not only Harrison, but Stanley Holloway as Alfred P. Doolittle ("Get Me to the Church on Time" is a high point) and Cecil Beaton as designer, with the result that the clothes are stunning, particularly in the famous Ascot scene.
 The result of this troubled history is a film that, thanks to its indestructible story, score and lyrics, cannot help but beguile. Harrison is impeccable, as is Wilfrid Hyde White as Col. Pickering, with Jeremy Brett well-cast as luckless Freddie Eynsford-Hill. But the enterprise is marred by some obviously artificial "staginess" and an occasional disjunction between the admirable Miss Nixon's voice and Hepburn's personality. And what of Audrey Hepburn? Even the most ardent of her many fans would have to concede that as a Cockney flowerseller, her efforts at authenticity simply fail to convince. However, from the moment of her transformation into a lady, all the Hepburn magic is intact: grace, dignity, charm, and vulnerability. Her appearance at the top of the stair in the white Beaton ballgown must surely become one of the iconic images of female beauty in the modern cinema, and is one that, ultimately, sends audiences home happy.
 - Rome, 10 November: After small parts in 10 movies and seven years acting in TV's "Rawhide" series, 34-year-old Clint Eastwood is now starring in an Italian-German co-production called A Fistful of Dollars, which happens to be a Western. The producers had originally wanted Henry Fonda in the lead, but they couldn't afford him. The director is a certain Bob Richardson, the American-sounding pseudonym of Sergio Leone, who made such epics as The Last Days of Pompeii (1959, uncredited) and The Colossus of Rhodes (1961). Here he has taken on a genre hitherto exclusively American, and scored a success. Other Italians involved in the picture disguised themselves behind names such as Dan Savio (the composer Ennio Morricone), Jack Dalmas (the cinematographer Massimo Dallamano) and John Welles (co-star Gian Maria Volonte). Eastwood had no need to change his name, although he plays the mysterious Man With No Name. The plot, taken from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), tells of how Eastwood, as a quick-on-the-trigger mercenary, plays off two rival gangs against each other, and then faces five gunmen alone in the final protracted shootout. With a small budget of $200,000, Leone shot the exteriors in Spain, while the interiors were filmed at Cinecittà in Rome. The chances are very good that he will receive a generous return on his investment.
- Paris, 30 November: In honor of the cinema, the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP) is screening a musical comedy cycle that includes Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain, starring Gene Kelly.
- Boulogne-Billancourt, 7 December: Elizabeth Taylor gave a cocktail party here for studio personnel and friends to mark the end of filming of Vincente Minnelli's The Sandpiper. During the party the American star's handbag was stolen.
- New York, 10 December:
 Paired with Audrey Hepburn last year in Charade, Cary Grant is now co-starring with Hollywood's other European gamine, the delightfully French Leslie Caron, in Father Goose. But the formula is not nearly as successful, thanks to a second-rate screenplay. Grant, with the aid of a beard and a sailor's cap, plays a beachcombing type forced to man a small island during World War II. Events saddle him with Caron, a schoolteacher, and half-a-dozen refugee schoolchildren. Competently directed by Ralph Nelson, the film might appeal as undemanding family viewing over the festive season.
- Paris, 15 December: Costa-Gavras, the French director of Greek descent who was formerly assistand director to René Clément and Yves Allégret, is shooting his first film, Compartiment tueurs (The Sleeping Car Murders).
- Stockholm, 21 December: Swedish actress Mai Zetterling has directed her first film, Älskande par (Loving Couples), co-starring Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom and Anita Björk. The film's story concerns three young expectant mothers as they think over their past relationships with men.
 - Hollywood, 31 December: After experiencing problems during the early 1960s, the past year has marked a recovery in the fortunes of most of the leading Hollywood film companies. Their profits have been on the rise, especially at Disney, boosted by the spectacular success of Mary Poppins, by far the biggest hit of the year and the most popular "live action" feature in the company's history. The movie stars Julie Andrews, who was snubbed by Warner Bros. for the role of Eliza Doolittle, and, ironically, it appears that Warners' lavish production of My Fair Lady has flopped at the box office, with Warners as the one top studio that has failed to share in the general recovery. Most impressive of all has been the performance of United Artists with two big James Bond hits, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger, along with Blake Edwards' The Pink Panther starring Peter Sellers, A Hard Day's Night with The Beatles, and Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, released late last year. MGM has climbed back into the black after a disastrous 1963 with the help of a couple of successful musicals, Viva Las Vegas and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, while 20th Century-Fox appears to be making a comeback under Darryl F. Zanuck and his son Richard. Embassy and Paramount had a big hit with Joseph E. Levine's The Carpetbaggers, and Columbia did well with The Cardinal and Dr. Strangelove. It looks as though the long postwar fall in audiences may at last be bottoming out. Certainly, the improvement in movie company results would indicate this.
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7 January - Long Beach, CA,