Timeline of Influential Milestones and Turning Points in Film History

Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History

1950s

Herein is a detailed timeline of the key film milestones, important turning points, and significant historical dates or events (organized by decade) that have had a significant influence on the world body of cinema and shaped its development. For more detailed accounts of many items, also see this site's extensive narratives on Film History by Decade, Film Milestones in Visual and Special Effects, and a comprehensive History of the Academy Awards.

Index to Timeline of Greatest Film Milestones and Turning Points

(by decade)

Pre-1900s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

1950s - Part 2

Year	Event and Significance
1954, 1956	Two film adaptations of author George Orwell's cautionary novels, the UK's first animated feature film Animal Farm (1954) and director Michael Anderson's film noirish 1984 (1956), starring Edmond O'Brien, Jan Sterling, and Michael Redgrave, were altered. It was revealed in the late 1990s that the CIA was partly responsible for modifying or softening Orwell's message in both films during the European post-war era, to make the tone of each film more overtly anti-Communist. Both works were changed to include more upbeat endings. [Ironically, the same distortions were made by MCA-Universal Studios for Terry Gilliam's version of Brazil (1985) - another film about a futuristic totalitarian society.]
1955	The Todd-AO widescreen process (with 65-mm (or 70-mm) wide film) was successfully introduced with director Fred Zinnemann's Oklahoma! It was also the first of the Rodgers & Hammerstein operettas, and it was the first Broadway show to integrate the music, songs and dances as an essential part of the story and character development.
1955	Tragically, James Dean -- the prototype of a rebellious adolescent -- was killed in a car accident at age 26, driving his new 550 Porsche Spyder. His car collided with a 1950 Ford at 5:45 p.m. at the intersection of Routes 466 and 41 near Cholame, California. He had appeared in only three films: East of Eden (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Giant (1956) - released posthumously. Both of his Best Actor Oscar nominations — for East of Eden and Giant — were also given posthumously.
1955	Movie studios opened their vaults for television rentals and sales. RKO Radio Pictures sold its film library to TV. RKO's King Kong (1933) was first televised in the US in 1956.
1955	The first feature animation in CinemaScope, Walt Disney's Lady and the Tramp, was released in the US. It also marked Disney's first full-length cartoon based on an original story rather than an established classic.
1955	Disneyland opened its first theme park in a former orange grove in Anaheim, California at a cost of $17 million.
1955	Blackboard Jungle was the first film to feature a rock-'n'-roll song, "Rock-Around-The-Clock." (sung by Bill Haley and His Comets during the credits). It was the first major Hollywood film to use R&R on its soundtrack. It inspired the next year's popular R&R film, Rock Around the Clock (1956).
1955	United Artists withdrew from the Motion Pictures Association of American (previously named the MPPDA) when it refused to issue a Production Code seal to its controversial film about drug addiction, director Otto Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm, starring Frank Sinatra. The film's success helped to loosen restrictions on such films. The code was amended to permit portrayals of prostitution and abortion as well as light profanity (the use of the words 'hell' and 'damn').
1955	The International Confederation of Art House Cinemas (CICAE - Confédération Internationale des Cinémas D’Art et Essai) was founded in Wiesbaden, Germany, to promote the diversity and visibility of all types of cinema. [An art house is a theater dedicated to the exhibition of films for a specialized audience, either classic revivals or new releases, frequently foreign or independently produced domestic films.]
1955	The modest Best Picture-winning sleeper film Marty was the first award-winning film (awarded in 1956) to be adapted from a dramatic televised play broadcast earlier. It was also the second Best Picture Oscar-winning film to also win the top prize (known as the Golden Palm (Palme d'Or)) at Cannes, and the shortest Best Picture winner (at 91 minutes). The promotional campaign for the film was more expensive than the film itself ($400,000 vs. $343,000) -- a Hollywood first. Tactics included offering 16mm prints of the film for viewing by Academy members - the pioneering forerunner of sending out videotape (or DVD) screeners many years later.
1955	The first atonal score for a narrative, feature-length Hollywood commercial film was in Vincente Minnelli's and MGM's The Cobweb - Leonard Rosenman's avant-garde soundtrack was perfectly suited for the film's private psychiatric clinic setting.
1955	Indian director Satyajit Ray's first film, the low-budget, coming-of-age tale Pather Panchali (aka The Song of the Road, or The Lament of the Path), was the first of an "Apu Trilogy" followed by Aparajito (1956) (aka The Unvanquished) and Apur Sansar (1959) (aka The World of Apu); it realistically portrayed low-class poverty in India through the eyes of its adolescent protagonist Apu (Subir Banerjee). It was the first Indian film to receive major critical attention internationally.
1956	Federico Fellini's Italian film La Strada, released in 1954, was the winner of the first official Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film -- awarded in 1956. Before this, there had only been a Special Academy Award (from 1947-1949) and an Honorary Academy Award (from 1950-1955) for Best Foreign Film.
1956	After making 16 movies together, the Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin film duo broke up, after the comedy/musical Hollywood or Bust.
1956	The beautifully-elegant actress Grace Kelly, "Hollywood's Fairy Tale Princess", married Prince Rainier III of Monaco. After appearing in such films as High Noon (1952) opposite Gary Cooper, John Ford's Mogambo (1953) opposite Clark Gable and Ava Gardner, films for Alfred Hitchcock (as his icy cool blonde) including Dial M For Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955), her Best Actress-winning The Country Girl (1954), and High Society (1956), Kelly retired from film-making.
1956	The film industry forbade racial epithets in films, but began to permit references to abortion, drugs, kidnapping, and prostitution under certain circumstances.
1956	Two science-fiction classics: Forbidden Planet and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, were released.
1956	Legendary producer/director Cecil B. DeMille remade his own 1923 silent epic, The Ten Commandments -- it was his last film. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, and provided actor Edward G. Robinson with a comeback role after he was unfairly blacklisted in the 1950s.
1956	Rock Around the Clock featured disc jockey Alan Freed and the group Bill Haley and His Comets (singing the title song) and many others (such as the Platters and Freddy Bell and The Bell Boys). It was the first film entirely dedicated to rock 'n' roll.
1956	Vincente Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy was one of the first key films dealing with teenage homosexuality.
1956	Elvis Presley's first film, Love Me Tender, was released, followed by Jailhouse Rock the next year. Elvis Presley also made an appearance on the TV variety show "The Ed Sullivan Show".
1956	The Wizard of Oz (1939) was first televised on CBS-TV on November 3rd -- an event that would become an annual holiday season event. It was the first feature-length film broadcast on TV.
1956	The first practical videotape recorder (VTR) was developed by the AMPEX Corporation in 1951. The first commercially-feasible ones (with 2 inch tape reels) were sold for $50,000 in 1956. Videotape became a staple of TV productions.
1956	Short on cash (like many Hollywood studios), Warner Bros. agreed to sell film rights to almost 800 feature films and 1,800 shorts to the Lansing Foundation.
1956	For the controversial film Baby Doll, the longest billboard ever made was placed in Times Square (NYC), displaying an image of star Carroll Baker (as Baby Doll) lying in a crib, in a sundress, and sucking her thumb.
1956	Le Monde du Silence/The Silent World (1956, Fr.), a nature documentary co-directed by Jacques Yves-Cousteau and Louis Malle, was the Palme d'Or winner - the first documentary to win this award. It also was the first film to use underwater cinematography to show the ocean depths in color.
1957	The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences' bylaws denied eligibility for Oscar nominations or consideration to anyone who admitted Communist Party membership or refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
1957	Roger Vadim's ...And God Created Woman was released in the US (heavily censored), starring international French starlet and pouty sex kitten nymphet Brigitte Bardot, ushering in a new level of sexuality into films.
1957	Island in the Sun was noted as groundbreaking in the late 50s for its two inter-racial romances. There was hugging in the inter-racial romance between local West Indian dime store clerk Margot Seaton (Dorothy Dandridge) and the governor's white aide David Archer (John Justin); in another parallel romance, however, there was only the holding of hands (reflecting a double standard regarding the black male) between Joan Fontaine as socialite Mavis Norman and Harry Belafonte as politically-ambitious black union official David Boyeur.
1957	The high-grossing teenage-oriented horror film and cult classic from the exploitation studio American-International, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, starred Michael Landon in a dual role. This rock and roll horror film (the first?) made popular the term "I Was A Teenage...".
1957	The famed Universal monster Frankenstein appeared for the first time in color, in UK Hammer Studio's version The Curse of Frankenstein directed by Terence Fisher, with Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein, and Christopher Lee as the Monster. This film marked the advent of a long cycle of the studio's stylistic gothic horror films for the next few decades, with Lee also playing the famed Dracula vampire, as in Fisher's Horror of Dracula (1958) the next year.
1957	Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's allegorical and influential classic art film The Seventh Seal (aka Det Sjunde Inseglet, Swe.), told of a symbolic chess game between black-robed Death (the Grim Reaper) and a 14th century knight (Max von Sydow) -- a treatise on God's existence and on life and death.
1958	The number of drive-in theaters in the U.S. peaked near 5,000. The mania for horror and science-fiction films also peaked in the late 50s.
1958	Following the success of Best Picture-winning Around the World in 80 Days (1956), producer Michael Todd (the third husband of Elizabeth Taylor) and co-developer of the Todd A-O sound system, was killed in a plane crash near Albuquerque, New Mexico on March 22, 1958. Taylor went on to 'steal' married actor Eddie Fisher (Todd's best friend) away from Debbie Reynolds. Following a quickie divorce, Fisher married Taylor the same day - May 12, 1959.
1958	The naturalistic, documentary-like cinéma verite (Fr.) technique (also called "direct cinema" (US) or "free cinema" (UK), and literally meaning 'film truth') began to spontaneously flourish in the late 50s and early 60s. It was characterized by the use of non-actors, hand-held cameras, on-location shoots, and non-intrusive filming techniques.
1958	Two of the more notable, low-budget alien-invasion and aberrant monster films were released: The Blob (with Steve McQueen in his first starring role) and The Fly.
1958	Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece of obsession, Vertigo, misunderstood and panned by critics when first released, used the 'smash-zoom' (track out and zoom in simultaneously) visual effect to simulate vertigo in the main protagonist (James Stewart).
1958	Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, with its incredible and breathtaking, three-minute, uninterrupted crane tracking shot under the opening credits, was the last of the film noirs in the classic period.
1958	The Cohn brothers (Harry and Jack), in control of Columbia Pictures since the 20s, were posthumously succeeded by Abe Schneider and Leo Jaffe. (Columbia had three successful Best Pictures in the 50s: From Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).)
1958	This year was marked with more Hollywood scandal for actress Lana Turner, known for her highly publicized affairs with men like Howard Hughes, Tyrone Power and Frank Sinatra. A small-time gangster named Johnny Stompanato was fatally stabbed with a butcher knife by Turner's 14 year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane during an incident of abuse in their home in Beverly Hills. During the inquest (filmed for TV), she nearly collapsed on the stand during dramatic testimony. The killing was declared a justifiable homicide by the coroner's jury. The scandal actually jump-started Turner's career, with her most successful film ever, Imitation of Life (1959).
1958	The Decks Ran Red, MGM's sea-faring suspense drama, featured the first inter-racial screen kiss, between Stuart Whitman (as crew member Leroy Martin) and Dorothy Dandridge (as the cook's flirtatious wife Mahia). See Tamango (1959) in the following year for a repeat of this milestone.
1958	Polish director Andrzej Wajda's wartime drama Ashes and Diamonds (aka Popiol i Diament, Pol.), the third in a trilogy of films, appealed to Polish youth. It was an anti-war film about resistance members in post-war Poland who were ordered to assassinate a Communist leader.
1959	The French "New Wave" (La Nouvelle Vague) movement (dubbed with the term in 1959) was marked by the works of forerunner Roger Vadim, and by the release of Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) (aka Bitter Reunion), followed shortly by Francois Truffaut's feature film debut The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (A Bout de Souffle). These inexpensive films were typified by the use of the jump cut, the hand-held camera, natural lighting, non-linear storytelling, on-location shootings, and loose, improvised direction and editing. Other French "New Wave" releases in the same year included Marcel Camus' Black Orpheus, Claude Chabrol's Les Cousins, and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour. The innovative film movement would last until the mid-1960s and remain an important influence on later film-making (i.e., the works of John Cassavetes, Quentin Tarantino, and others).
1959	The chariot race sequence in director William Wyler's Best Picture-winning, wide-screen Technicolor epic blockbuster Ben-Hur set the standard for all subsequent action sequences. It was the first film to win eleven Oscars (it lost only in the Screenplay category), breaking the record of 8 Oscar wins originally set by Gone With the Wind (1939) and 9 Oscar wins set a year earlier by Gigi (1958). The spectacle of the film was designed to lure audiences away from their televisions.
1959	The comic team of The Three Stooges made their last (180th) film, Sappy Bullfighters.
1959	Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty, shot in Technirama, was the second animated feature shot in widescreen, and the most expensive animated film to date (at $6 million).
1959	Aroma-Rama, an experimental, short-lived scenting system developed by inventor Charles Weiss, was introduced to add over 50 scents to the Italian documentary film Behind the Great Wall, by filtering 'Oriental' aromas into the auditorium through the air-conditioning system. The following year, a competing process was called Smell-O-Vision. Developed by Mike Todd, Jr., son of the famed showman, it piped odors or scents to each seat in a theatre auditorium. Scent of Mystery was the only film made in Smell-O-Vision. (Over twenty years later, cult director John Waters paid homage to Smell-O-Vision with scratch-and-sniff "Odorama" cards for his classic film Polyester (1981).)
1959	Tamango, Hal Roach's film about a slave ship voyage en route to Cuba from Africa, was noted as having the second inter-racial screen kiss, between slave ship Captain John Reiker (Curt Jurgens) and his slave mistress/concubine Aiche (Dorothy Dandridge). The film was initially banned due to its inter-racial romance.
1959	In October of this year, violet-eyed, buxom Elizabeth Taylor made history when she secured a contract with 20th Century Fox in October 1959 to star in Cleopatra (1963) - she simultaneously became the highest-paid performer in the history of Hollywood at $1 million, the first Hollywood star to receive the monumental sum for a single picture.