- Prague, 1 January:
 Anxiety is growing among filmmakers here. The period of comparative freedom of expression, enjoyed during the "liberal spring," appears to be drawing to a close. Relations between the film industry and the state have become increasingly strained since troops entered the city. Milos Forman and Jirí Menzel have been warned about giving an unfavorable impression of the conditions of the working class and Forman, who is in Paris, has decided not to return to Czechoslovakia. His last film to be made here was Horí, má panenko (The Firemen's Ball) in 1967.
- Hollywood, 12 January: Judy Garland, who divorced Mark Herron in 1967, has married again. Her husband is a young hairdresser named Mickey Deans.
- New York, 15 January: Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of Fox, has refused to distribute Edouard Luntz's Le Grabuge (Hung Up), from a scenario by Jean Duvignaud, with Julie Dassin and Patricia Gozzi. Zanuck is shocked by the anti-bourgeois violence in the film.
- New York, 17 February: Hedy Lamarr, the star of Gustav Machaty's 1933 production Ecstasy, has instigated proceedings against the editor of her biography Ecstasy and Me, My Life as a Woman, and against all who took part in the writing and publishing of the book, which the actress describes as being obscene and shocking. Lamarr is demanding $21 million as compensation for the damage done to both her reputation and career.
- Boston, 11 March: An exhibitor has been sentenced to six months in prison and fined $1,000 for screening Robert Aldrich's film The Killing of Sister George. The film had been banned by the local censor due to its controversial lesbian love scenes.
- Paris, 20 March:
 The Jean Vigo prize has been awarded to the first feature by the documentary director Maurice Pialat for L'Enfance nue (Me or Naked Childhood), made two years ago and not yet released. Pialat exhibits a superb control of his subject, an examination of childhood, which is never allowed to become sentimental. Played by non-professionals, the film tells the touching story of a 10-year-old boy, abandoned by his mother, and sent to a working-class foster family where his behavior is disturbed. He is then moved to a second family, which proves more successful, though the boy's tendency to lose control of his emotions leads to a crisis. As a distant cousin to The Four Hundred Blows (1959) and Le Vieil homme et l'enfant (The Two of Us) (1967), it is therefore not surprising to find that François Truffaut and Claude Berri are two of the film's executive producers.
- Boston, 30 March: The Killing of Sister George continues to be shown after the court ruled against the seizure of the film. Judith Crist, one of the country's most respected film critics, stated during the trial that not only is the film not in the least pornographic but, in her view, it is among the 10 best films of the year.
 - London, 10 April: In his first project as a director, Richard Attenborough has restaged the First World War on Brighton pier. Oh! What a Lovely War is an ambitious attempt to translate Joan Littlefield's history of the 1914-18 conflict to the screen. Her Stratford East stage hit combined music-hall songs, diaries and contemporary commentary in a withering attack on the folly of war and the fatuity of the ruling class. Attenborough has retained the basic structure, anchored in a seaside pierrot show, and opened it out to take in the Victorian splendor of Brighton pier along with the rolling hills of Sussex Downs, which stand in for the Western Front. The film is full of small miracles of production design: John Mills's Fied Marshal Haig directs the Battle of the Somme from the top of an amusement park slide while the mounting losses are posted on a cricket scoreboard; a member of the representative Smith family, Maurice Roeves, gets on the pier's miniature railway and leaves for the Front; at the end of the film the last surviving Smith boy follows a red tape from the trenches to where the Armistice is being signed. Some of the searing quality of the original has been smothered by the scale of the production and the roster of stars in cameo roles, among them Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Dirk Bogarde, Michael and Vanessa Redgrave and, memorably, Maggie Smith as the raddled old soubrette who lures young men on to the music-hall stage and straight into the welcoming arms of the recruiting sergeant.
- Los Angeles, 14 April:
 When Ingrid Bergman unsealed the envelope containing the name of the Best Actress winner at this year's Oscar® ceremonies, she exclaimed, "It's a tie!" Barbra Streisand (for her impersonation of the vaudeville queen Fanny Brice in Funny Girl) and Katharine Hepburn (for her portrayal of Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter) had each obtained exactly the same number of votes. Hepburn thus becomes the first performer to win a trio of best acting Oscars®, and her tally of 11 nominations is the highest recorded to date in the Academy's history. The Best Actor award went to Cliff Robertson for his extraordinary perfomance as the mentally challenged Charly. The jolly Dickens musical adaptation, Oliver!, received both the Best Picture and Best Director (Carol Reed) statuettes. Supporting acting awards went to Jack Albertson for The Subject Was Roses and to Ruth Gordon for her nosy Devil-worshiping neighbor in Rosemary's Baby.
- Las Vegas, 8 May: Lana Turner has married magician and hypnotist Michael Dante.
 - Cannes, 23 May: Although the prizes at this year's Cannes Film Festival were spread among the British, French, Brazilian, Swedish and American entries, it was a Soviet film that created most interest. Completed in 1966, Andrei Rublev has been kept on the shelf by the government of the USSR, who found various pretexts to ban it, one of them being that they felt it was too "dark" for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution.
 The film, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, consists of eight imaginary episodes in the life of Rublem, the 15th-century icon painter, as he journeys through feudal Russia. Faced with the cruelty and horror what he sees, he abandons speech and art, until a simple act renews his faith in mankind. This slow, powerful and impressive epic, in black-and-white and CinemaScope, ends with a color sequence that does justice to the paintings.
As for those who took the prizes, the Grand Prix was awarded to Lindsay Anderson's If, a vitriolic attack on the British class system that owes much to Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933). Karel Reisz, Anderson's colleague from the days of the Free Cinema movement in the 1950s, was represented by Isadora, for which Vanessa Redgrave won the prize for best actress for her role as the celebrated American dancer Isadora Duncan. Jean-Louis Trintignant was chosen as best actor for his portrayal of the honest judge in Costa-Gavras' effective political thriller, Z. The Cinema Novo from Brazil was acknowledged by the jury, headed by Luchino Visconti, with the best director award given to Glauber Rocha for his baroque Antonia das Mortes. The Special Jury Prize went to another film with a political theme, Adalen 31. Directed by Bo Witenberg, it concerns a lengthy strike at a paper mill in a small town in the north of Sweden in 1931, which ended with five workers being killed by soldiers. The actor Dennis Hopper gained the prize for a best first feature, Easy Rider.
 - New York, 25 May: For his role as the unattractive bum Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, Dustin Hoffman was paid 10 times more than he received for his part in The Graduate a couple of years ago. With greasy hair, pallid complexion, bad teeth and gammy leg, he brilliantly represents a man who merges into the seedy and sorded atmosphere of New York City as conjured up by British director John Schlesinger, making his first American movie. Opposite Hoffman is Jon Voight as a would-be stud. It is the relationship between this big, blond, likable dimwit and the small down-and-outer that is the impressive centerpiece of this comedy-drama. John Barry composed the music for the film score, but it's Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'," sung by Harry Nilsson, that audiences hum walking out of the theatre. The film has received an "X" rating from the MPAA for its nudity and strong sexual content.
- Hollywood, 26 May: Edgar Bronfman replaces Robert O'Brien as president and chief executive officer at MGM.
- New York, 28 May:
 Henry Fonda makes a rare excursion into double-dyed villainy in Sergio Leone's C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West). The man who became a Western film icon as Marshal Wyatt Earp in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), has been cast as a cold-eyed killer targeting Claudia Cardinale, a widow locked in battle with the railroad over water rights. Leone's follow-up to his "Dollars" trilogy, co-scripted with Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, is built around a complex series of references to classic Westerns -- High Noon, Shane and The Searchers in the first 15 minutes alone -- all of which are couched in Leone's bravura, operatic style. Leone calls this collision of Western stereotypes with the onward march of frontier history a "ballet of the dead." The Monument Valley locations also mark Leone's departure from the Cinecittà origins of his "spaghetti" Westerns. Reportedly, the set for "Flagstone" cost more than the entire budget of A Fistful of Dollars. Once Upon a Time in the West also boasts the longest credits sequence in the history of the Western. Originally, Leone wanted to say goodbye to his earlier triumphs by killing off Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef, the stars of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, at the beginning of the picture, but Eastwood wouldn't play ball.
 - Paris, 7 June: Just opened is Eric Rohmer's Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night at Maud's), the fourth of his Six Moral Tales, and probably his best film to date. This witty, erotic and profound film proves that long intellectual discussions can be as cinematic as more obviously visual material. Set in snowy Clermont-Ferrand, it tells of an engineer and devout Catholic (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who spends a chaste night with the dark, seductive and free-thinking Maud (Françoise Fabian), even though they are mutually attracted. She calls him "a shameless Christian pretending to be a shameless Don Juan."
- Washington, DC, 8 June: The State Department has just announced that Stanley Kubrick' film 2001: A Space Odyssey is the USA's official entry for the Moscow Film Festival in July. Selection was made by three representatives of the film industry: director-producer Frank Capra, producer Walter Mirisch and scriptwriter Michael Straight.
- New York, 10 June: David Picker, aged 33, has been elected president of United Artists. He replaces Arthur Krim who has been moved on to the board of directors with Robert Benjamin.
- New York, 10 June: Warner Bros.-Seven Arts' shareholders have approved a merger with Kinney National Services. The cost is estimated at $11.5 million.
- Camp Pendleton, 10 June: Franklin J. Schaffner has finished filming Patton at the Marine Corps base in California. Shooting started in Spain in February.
- New York, 18 June:
 Sam Peckinpah's directing career has been in the doldrums since 1965 when he fell out with the producer of Major Dundee. Now he has re-established himself with The Wild Bunch in which William Holden stars as the aging leader of a band of outlaws driven into Mexico after an unsuccessful bank raid. They are men out of their time. Involvement in the civil war raging between the Mexican army and guerilla forces leads to a climactic battle against impossible odds in which the gang is wiped out in a burst of sensually filmed and edited violence, which confronts head-on the violence that lies at the heart of the Western. Peckinpah's treatment of the theme has engendered a great deal of controversy among audiences and critics.
- Boston, 24 June: The Supreme Court has upheld the ban on Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies, which was shot in the Bridgewater State Hospital for mentally disturbed criminals in 1967. The film contains scenes of abuses of patients at the hands of guards and doctors. However, permission has been granted for the film to be shown non-commerically for groups of psychiatric professionals.
 - New York, 27 June: Judy Garland, who died of a drug overdose in London six days ago, was buried today. Her passing at the age of 47 marks the end of a difficult life that encompassed worldwide fame and adulation but was punctuated by nervous breakdowns, suicide attempts, studio suspensions, lawsuits and five husbands (including Vincente Minnelli). Her fifth, Mickey Deans, was present at the funeral with her daughter, Liza Minnelli, and son-in-law, Peter Allen. From The Wizard of Oz (1939) onwards, she remained uniquely gifted, never more so than in A Star Is Born (1954), in which she made a comeback after a long rough patch. In 1967 Garland provided in effect, her own epitaph: "When you have lived the life I've lived, when you have loved and suffered and been madly happy and desperately sad -- well, that's when you realize that you'll never be able to set it all down... maybe you'd rather die first." She was interred at Fern Cliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, NY.
- Algiers, 1 July: The Algerian government has announced the nationalization of all film companies. The move is aimed at forcing big foreign companies with branches in Algeria, such as Paramount, MGM and Fox, to give up their interests in the country.
- New York, 14 July:
 Trailing clouds of glory from the Cannes Festival, where it won the directing prize for Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, is Easy Rider. Hopper co-stars with producer Fonda as two hippie bikers searching for the "real America" to the strains of a pounding rock soundtrack performed by the likes of Hoyt Axton, Mars Bonfire (Steppenwolf), The Byrds, The Band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Electric Prunes and Roger McGuinn. Jack Nicholson, a graduate of Roger Corman's Z-budget movie academy, plays the boozy lawyer who comes along for the ride. Hopper's reputation for difficult behavior has, until recently, barred him from most of the studios. Now the majors are scrambling to emulate the sensational success of Easy Rider.
- New York, 28 July: MGM has taken Kirk Kerkorian to court. The latter wants to buy $15 million worth of MGM shares. However, since finance for the purchase comes mainly from Transamerica, which already owns United Artists, this is regarded as unacceptable.
 - Switzerland, 1 August: The award of the Grand Prix of the Locarno Film Festival to Charles mort ou vif (Charles Dead or Alive), the debut feature by the Swiss director Alain Tanner, is a rather late recognition of the young Swiss cinema, and promises to wake the national industry out of its lethargy. Tanner, a former TV and documentary director, has been the moving spirit of the movement. Charles mort ou vif, a cruel fable that questions the complacent values of Swiss society, deals with a middle-aged watchmaker (François Simon, Michel Simon's son), who abandons the rat race for a new life.
- Hollywood, 9 August:
 With Roman Polanski in England preparing a film, his pregnant wife Sharon Tate was killed last night in a particularly shocking manner. She was in her home in the Hollywood Hills entertaining three guests: the producer Voyteck Freykowsky, his girlfriend Abigail Folger and Jan Sebring, the hair stylist. Nobody knows exactly what happened next. When police arrived this morning they found four mutilated bodies, one of them Sharon Tate, who had been stabbed 15 times and whose breasts had been severed. On the front door, the work "Pigs" had been scrawled in blood.
- New York, 10 August: Despite the court decision, Kirk Kerkorian has acquired 24 percent of MGM by turning to alternative sources of finance.
- Woodstock, 15 August: A vast outdoor rock music festival opened here today outside this small Upstate New York town. Michael Wadleigh has been chosen to film the concerts for Warner Bros., who have acquired the film rights.
- Paris, 28 August: Release of Robert Bresson's new film Une femme douce (A Gentle Creature), based on the short story by Dostoevsky. The film reveals the talent of Dominique Sanda.
- Paris, 5 September: Release of Jean-Pierre Melville's L'Armée des ombres (The Army in the Shadows), a drama of the Resistance, adapted from Joseph Kessel's novel and starring Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret and Paul Meurisse.
 - Connecticut, 23 September: George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is not the first screen portrayal of the West's legendary outlaws, leaders of the "Hole in the Wall" gang, but it looks like it is the most profitable. Paul Newman and Robert Redford make an attractive Butch and Sundance (whose real name was Harry Longbaugh), laid-back outlaws for whom the West is a playground rather than the killing ground portrayed by Sam Peckinpah. The film is full of the currently fashionable nostalgia for the passing of the West -- "the horse is dead," announces a bicycle salesman -- and the use Hill makes of sepia-toned photographs glows warmly with the light of other days. At the center of the film is the relationship between Newman and Redford, frozen forever in the last frame as they break cover to die at the hands of a small army of Bolivian soldiers.
- New York, 29 September: Jerry Lewis held a press conference to announce the creation of his new theater chain in association with Network Cinema Corp. He hopes to open 750 movie theaters by 1974. The first is already under construction.
- New York, 8 October:
 Paul Mazursky has made his directing debut with Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a film that capitalizes on the new wave of permissiveness and the fashionable encounter group philosophy it has spawned. It's at such a group that sophisticated suburban swingers Robert Culp and Natalie Wood discover a philosophy of sexual freedom that they then try to sell to their uptight friends Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon. Mazursky's sharp comedy of manners draws excellent performances from the principals, particularly from the 30-year-old Gould, who began his career in the chorus line of the stage version of Irma La Douce. Broadway stardom arrived when he co-starred with Barbra Streisand in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, and he got Streisand wholesale when he married her in 1963. They divorced last year as her career took off while his seemed stalled. Now movie stardom beckons for the agreeably self-deprecating actor.
 - Rome, 14 October: In his latest film, Luchino Visconti has set out to examine the ideological link between the Nazis and the capitalist bourgeoisie. Entitled La Caduta degli dei (Gotterdämmerung or The Damned), this German-Italian co-production has a fine international cast that includes Ingrid Thulin, Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Renaud Verley, Umberto Orsini and Helmut Berger. It deals with the conflicts within a powerful family of munitions manufacturers operating in Germany during the rise of Nazism. The film is directed in a flamboyant style, typified by a scene where Berger performs in Dietrich-style drag.
- Paris, 24 October:
 Because of her series of Angélique films, Michèle Mercier has become one of France's most popular stars. It all began in 1964 with Angélique, the first of the films based on the books by Serge and Anne Golon, recounting the adventures of a Forever Amber-like heroine in the France of Louis XIV. That was followed by Marvelous Angélique (1965), Angélique and the King (1966), The Indomitable Angélique (1967) and Angélique and the Sultan (1968). Settings and costumes were colorful and Mercier pouted prettily throughout. Now moviegoers can see her in Une veuve en or (A Golden Widow), directed by Michel Audiard and co-starring Claude Rich.
 - London, 13 November: Flamboyant director Ken Russell has fashioned a sexually frank and passionate version of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. This is familiar territory for Russell, who cut his teeth making arts documentaries for British television, and he is well-served by his principal players: Glenda Jackson as the strongwilled Gudrun Brangwen; Alan Bates as the D. H. Lawrence figure Rupert Birkin; and Oliver Reed, radiating bull-like potency as the mine-owner Gerald Crich. His firelit nude wrestling match with Bates is one of the highlights of the film.
- San Francisco, 14 November: Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas have founded American Zoetrope. The main aim of the company is "to work with the most talented youngsters in all aspects of the cinema, using the latest in technology."
- New York, 18 November: Director Elia Kazan's latest work, The Arrangement, with Kirk Douglas, Deborah Kerr and Faye Dunaway, has received scathing reviews from the critics. The screenplay was based on Kazan's own novel.
- Rome, 1 December:
 Federico Fellini has defined his new work, Fellini Satyricon, based on Petronius' ancient Roman fragment and other fables, as more science fictional than historical. "Decadent Rome is as far from me as the moon," the director explained. The picture tells of two students in Rome circa A.D. 500, who go their different ways after fighting over a pretty boy. Their separate adventures include drunken orgies, imprisonment on a galley ship and a duel fought with the Minotaur, before they meet up again. The film is really La Dolce vita in Ancient Rome, with Fellini looking with disapproval at the immoral goings-on in a pre-Christian society, and by implication today's. He emphasizes this connection by casting two unmistakably modern young men in the leading roles: Englishman Martin Potter and American Hiram Keller as Encolpius and Ascyltus, whose sole aim is the pursuit of pleasure. Fellini employed more than 250 character actors and extras and had 90 sets built, making Satyricon the most expensive movie made at Cinecittà since Ben-Hur.
 - New York, 8 December: The military regime of the Greek colonels is the target of a new political thriller, Z, shot in Algeria by the Greek-born director Constantin Costa-Gavras who is now a French citizen. Yves Montand, the leader of a pacifist oppostion party in an unidentified Mediterranean country (which is clearly Greece), is knocked down by a van and dies after undergoing brain surgery. Investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Trintignant treats the case as a murder trial when he uncovers a government-supported conspiracy to assassinate "Z." Based on a novel by Vassili Vassilkos, Z is a virtuoso indictment of the junta now ruling Greece and the methods applied by totalitarian regimes throughout the world. The son of a Greek bureaucrat, Costa-Gavras left Greece at the age of 18 to pursue a degree in literature at the Sorbonne. After attending the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC), he became assistant director to Yves Allégret and René Clément before making his directing debut with Compartiment tueurs (The Sleeping Car Murders) (1965), a taut suspenser starring Yves Montand. His second film was Une homme de trop (Shock Troops) (1967), a harrowing tale about the French Resistance.
- New York, 16 December:
 Fox has reportedly spent $24 million on filming the smash-hit stage musical, Hello, Dolly!. The studio has staked the money on hot star Barbra Streisand, who delivers the goods with exuberance, vivacity, a great line in rapid-fire patter and, of course, that voice. However, it must be said that as Dolly Levi, matchmaker and self-appointed fixer, in search of a rich husband (Walter Matthau), she is at least 20 years too young for the role, which may disturb some. Terrific entertainment, though, with Gene Kelly directing a first-rate cast and handing the choreography over to Michael Kidd.
 - Hollywood, 22 December: Josef von Sternberg, one of the great pictorial stylists of the Golden Age of Hollywood, has died in a Hollywood hospital at the age of 75. He was born plain Josef Sternberg in Vienna in 1894 -- the "von" was acquired later in Hollywood -- and arrived in America with his parents at the age of seven. As a silent film director at Paramount, he quickly created his own artificial world of light and shade filled with strong men and mysterious women. He launched Marlene Dietrich in 1930 in Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), and in six subsequent films she became the enigmatic centerpiece of Sternberg's obsession with light and composition. Known as a notoriously difficult man to work with, Sternberg once said, "The only way to succeed is to make people hate you. That way they remember you."
- Paris, 31 December: Industry professionals are worried by the number of movie theater closings. They blame the increasing popularity of TV (there are now 9,378,032 sets licensed in France) and also the programming by ORTF of 327 feature films broadcast during 1969.
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1 March - Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain,