- Prague, 2 January: Dusan Hanak's feature-length documentary Obarazy stareho sveta (Images of the Old World) has been banned by the authorities because they conside that the picture it paints of the Slovak peasantry is "too negative."
- Los Angeles, 10 January: The CBS television network has stated that it intends to stop production of films for the big screen. CBS has produced 27 films, recording a total loss of $10 million.
- Paris, 10 January: Actress Mia Farrow has begun filming here for Claude Chabrol. The film, Doctor Popaul, co-stars Jean-Paul Belmondo.
- Rome, 27 January: Actor Gian Maria Volonte has refused an offer from Hollywood of 250 million lira (approx. US$160,000), a sum he considers disproportionate. He reportedly has said that his "left-wing sympathies" prevent him from accepting such a high wage for his job as an actor.
- Los Angeles, 3 February: A Superior Court has ruled that the late Bela Lugosi's identification with his movie role as Count Dracula, the Transylvanian vampire, was so pronounced that his heirs could inherit and made money from it. The actor's widow Hope I. Lugosi and her son Bela George Lugosi sued Universal Pictures after the studio began licensing producers of Dracula merchandise (games, masks, T-shirts, etc.). Universal has been ordered to hand over any licensing agreements it made since 1964 to the heirs.
- Hollywood, 5 February: Charles Chaplin's nomination for a star on the 19-block Walk of Fame has been rejected by the Chamber of Commerce Executive Board here. It appears that Chaplin's Marxist views are behind this rejection.
- Bordeaux, 6 February: During the screening of the Italian film La Battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers (1965), by Gillo Pontecorvo, fighting broke out in the theater and in the street between the audience and nostalgic supporters of French Algeria.
- New York, 14 February:
 In only her fourth feature, Liza Minnelli lights up the screen as the wild and electifying Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse's Cabaret, which was shown last night before an invited audience that included the cast and director. The role was clearly tailored to suit Minnelli's exuberant style and warm, throaty voice, reminiscent of her mother -- Judy Garland. The brashness that covers the insecurities of her character is perfectly suited to the brashness that covered the insecurities of Berlin in the 1930s. Of course she is too good a singer to be found in such a sleazy dive as the Kit Kat Club, but who cares? Her songs are put over with such bite and passion, and her acting carries a moving conviction. Sally Bowles, an American stranded in Germany on the eve of Europe's cataclysm, is not as decadent as she thinks she is and, indeed, in her scenes with Michael York, the young, innocent Englishman abroad, she is both vulnerable and lovable. Fosse has wisely jettisoned most of the stage musical, but has kept the cabaret itself at the center of the movie. With excellent color photography (Geoffrey Unsworth) and editing (David Bretherton), the nightclub is seen to reflect the frenetic and ugly nature of German society at that time, with the brilliantly clever songs providing a pungent commentary on the situation. Joel Grey's lewd, sexually ambivalent and anti-Semitic emcee provides the right tone throughout.
- Rome, 17 February: French actor Pierre Clémenti is on trial for possession of drugs. There is a real risk that he may be sentenced to a term in prison.
- New York, 27 February: Stanley Kubrick has published an article in the New York Times defending A Clockwork Orange against its critics. According to him, the film illustrates that it is man who corrupts society rather than the reverse.
- Algiers, 2 March:
 Carried along by the enthusiasm for the agrarian revolution launched by the Algerian authorities four months ago, those who work in television, radio and films have met today to finally create a Union of the Audiovisual Arts. The participants have assessed the situation of the last 10 years and found it wanting. Among them was the director Mohamed Bouamari, who has invented the term "cinema djidid," (new cinema) to describe the sort of films he feels Algeria has need of from now on. Like Bouamari, many young Algerian directors have reproached their country's film industry since Independence for dealing almost exclusively with the struggle for liberation while ignoring the many contemporary problems that the nation is facing. The newly-formed Union, therefore, sees the new cinema as a means of making people aware of Algeria's priorities, especially for its poorer citizens.
 - New York, 9 March: The ghost of Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby stalks through Peter Bogdanovich's latest, What's Up, Doc?. It's a contemporary slice of screwball with Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand stepping into the shoes of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Streisand is the kook who makes life miserable for stuffy musicologist O'Neal and his fiancée, portrayed by newcomer Madeline Kahn. It's all great fun, punctuated by bursts of hectic physical comedy, but can never match the superbly self-contained comic worlds created by the 1930s originals, nor the dark quality that Hawks gave to Bringing Up Baby, where a hint of madness lingers in the air.
- New York, 15 March:
 Adapted from Mario Puzo's best-selling Mafia saga, The Godfather has opened here to acclaim. Paramount's selection of Francis Ford Coppola to direct this expensive project, after Richard Brooks, Peter Yates and Costa-Gavras refused, was surprising, considering that his main reputations so far is as a screenwriter, and his films as director have not been commerically successful [e.g., The Playgirls and the Bellboy (1962), Dementia 13 (1963), You're a Big Boy Now (1966), Finian's Rainbow (1968) and The Rain People (1969)]. The production was beset with difficulties. Before shooting began, the Italian-American Civil Rights League held a rally in Madison Square Garden and raised $600,000 towards attempts to stop the film which they claimed was a slur on their community. There were bomb threats, and the producer's car was fired at. Finally, Coppola agreed to eliminate the words "Mafia" and "Cosa Nostra" from the screenplay, to employ some members of the League, and to donate proceeds from the movie's premiere to the League's hospital fund.
The long (175 minutes) and leisurely apotheosis of The Family marvelously builds up a rich pattern of relationships, meticulously detailing the rituals of an enclosed group. However, even though Coppola and Puzo's script seems to condemn the violence and cruelty of the Mafia, the tone of the film is laudatory and romantic. Marlon Brando in the title role, for which Edward G. Robinson and Lord Laurence Olivier were both strongly tipped, has given his declining career a new impetus. With stuffed cheeks and an almost inaudible whisper, Brando's Don Vito Corleone is a great achievement. His barely stated movements make little concession to emotion as he dispenses life and death, though here is a giant of a man also aware of his mortality and the limitations of his heirs, among whom are his sons played by James Caan, John Cazale and Al Pacino. The Godfather contains some unforgettable set pieces such as the opening wedding celebration, a severed horse's head left in an enemy's bed, and the cold-blooded killings happening simultaneously with a baby's baptism.
- Mexico, 20 March: Police have found Marlon Brando's son Christian being held by a group of people who say that his mother, Anna Kashfi, paid them to kidnap the child, who is thirteen. Kashfi, who was married to Brando from 1957 to 1959, has been arrested and imprisoned in Los Angeles for disorderly behavior and assault.
- New York, 25 March: The opening of the first Cuban Film Festival here was broken up by anti-Castro youths last night. A group of about 21 demonstrators caused a considerable uproar by releasing white mice among the audience during the screening of the feature film, Humberto Solas' Lucia. They then proceeded to throw stink bombs and fights broke out. Several people have been arrested.
- Paris, 30 March:
 "For one moment, they hold history in their hands. With one terrible blow, they make it," is the publicity slogan for The Assassination of Trotsky, Joseph Losey's new film. However, when political cinema seems to be in vogue, it is surprising how apolitical this Anglo-Franco-Italian production is. Losey and his screenwriters, Nicholas Mosely and Masolino D'Amico, have opted to concentrate more on the psychology of the protagonists than the wider implications of their actions. It succeeds on this level because of the performances of Richard Burton, who creates a deliberately dry and pedantic figure as the exiled Russian revolutionary leader, and Alain Delon as his nemesis, the passionate Stalinist agent, who tracks down Trotsky to Mexico, and kills him with an ice axe. The latter's character is best revealed as he watches a bullfight. Shot on location in Mexico and Italy, the film, while taking some liberties, is an attempt to faithfully recapture a key moment in the history of our times.
- Paris, 31 March: France's most famous cinema, the Gaumont Palace in the place Clichy, is closing today to make way for a hotel and shopping complex. The 6,000-seat theater first opened in 1911; in 1966 seating was reduced to 2,800 when the screen was modified (advertised as the widest in Europe) for Cinerama.
- New York, 1 April: Cosmopolitan magazine has published a centerfold of Burt Reynolds in the nude.
 - Los Angeles, 10 April: Nearing his 83rd birthday, Charles Chaplin has been awarded a special Oscar® for his "exceptional and invaluable contribution to the art of cinema in the twentieth century." The golden statuette was presented to him by co-host Jack Lemmon and president of the Academy Daniel Taradash. Chaplin revelled in the emotion of the event, and delighted the audience with an old vaudeville trick involving a bowler hat. To mark Chaplin's return to Hollywood, the Academy staged a spectacle, entitled "Lights, Camera, Action," that celebrated Chaplin's phenomenal career. Forty-three years after giving him an Oscar® for The Circus at the very first Academy Awards ceremony, the United States has made its peace with Chaplin. He arrived in New York on 2 April and the following day appeared at a gala tribute to him at the Philharmonic Hall in aid of the Lincoln Center Film Society. There, the legendary filmmaker told the cheering audience, "This is my renaissance. I am being born again." Hollywood, it seems, has now forgotten the shabby way Chaplin was treated during the McCarthy era and, for his part, the talented comedian has been overwhelmed by the affection and adulation that have greeted his return.
- Los Angeles, 10 April:
 The most successful movie at the 44th Academy Awards was the pulsating police thriller The French Connection, from director William Friedkin. Not only was it voted Best Picture but it also gained the Best Director prize for Friedkin and the Best Actor Oscar® for his star, Gene Hackman, superb as the driven detective Popeye Doyle. Jane Fonda was voted Best Actress for her performance as Bree Daniels in Alan J. Pakula's Klute. Peter Bogdanovich's homage to the passing of small-town America, The Last Picture Show, won two major awards. Ben Johnson, a particular favorite of John Ford, was voted Best Supporting Actor for his performance as grizzled Sam the Lion, proprietor of a moribund movie theater in a small Texas town. Cloris Leachman's poignant performance in the same film as a housewife edging into despair won her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar®. A runner-up in the 1946 Miss America pageant, Leachman is a veteran of Broadway and television but until now has remained a relatively unknown movie personality in spite of incisive performances in several films, not least Robert Aldrich's 1950s classic Kiss Me Deadly. The Best Foreign Film award was won for the sixth time by an Italian film, this time Vittorio De Sica's Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis), an exquisitely photographed drama about an aristocratic Jewish family in Italy during the Second World War who choose to ignore the creeping shadow of the concentration camps until it is too late.
- New York, 17 April: Variety has announced that The Godfather has taken in $26 million at the box office in the first few days of its release. No other picture has ever equaled these results.
 - Barcelona, 25 April: The lifeless body of George Sanders has been discovered in a hotel room in Casteldefells, near Barcelona. He had committed suicide with a drug overdose, and left a note that blamed it all on boredom: "Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool." For over 30 years Sanders had padded down a path of silky villainy and purring caddishness, dispensing sneers and disdainful dialogue with an inimitably studied weariness. In fact the pose concealed an insecure man and immensely hardworking actor whose career reached a peak in 1950 with All About Eve. Nature created Sanders to play Addison de Witt, the waspish theatre critic whose voice-over provides a barbed commentary to that film's backstage backstabbing. That performance won Sanders a Best Supporting Actor Oscar®, but the success seemed to dismay him into a slow decline. He was married to tempestuous actress Zsa Zsa Gabor from 1949 to 1954, and was briefly married to her sister Magda in 1970.
- Cannes, 19 May:
 Present-day Italian cinema seems to be particularly effective in delving into the political and social realities of the nation. The Italian selection in competition at Cannes this year is a reflection of this preoccupation, offering three films that investigate the corruption at the heart of capitalism: Lina Wertmuller's Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore (Mimi), Elio Petri's La Classe operate va in paradiso (Lulu the Tool) and Francesco Rosi's Il Caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair). The latter two shared the Grand Prix, a unanimous decision reached by the jury, presided over by Joseph Losey. Petri's work deals with a factory piece-worker (Gian Maria Volonte), obsessed with achieving the highest daily output, who alienates his fellow workers, inviting exploitation by shop stewards and frustrating his mistress (Mariangela Melato). In The Mattei Affair, Rosi makes use of a bold, semi-documentary style to dissect the life and death of the socialist oil magnate Enrico Mattei, "the most powerful Italian since Augustus Caesar," killed in a mysterious plane crash in 1962. Volonte gives another fine performance in the title role. Two East European films were also among the winners: the visually striking science fiction allegory, Solaris, from Soviet Andrei Tarkovsky, which gained the Special Jury Prize, while the Hungarian Miklós Jancsó was given the director's award for his highly stylized political fable, Még kér a nép (Red Psalm).
- Paris, 13 June: Over 200 international personalities from the cinema and entertainment world have published a petition in protest against the arbitrary arrest of the Turkish filmmaker Yilmaz Guney. He has been accused of aiding urban guerillas, apparently without a shred of evidence.
- San Rafael, 26 June: George Lucas has started shooting American Graffiti for Universal, on location in this California town. Francis Ford Coppola is producing the film with a modest $750,000 budget, $90,000 of which has been set aside for the rights to the 25 songs on the film's soundtrack.
- New York, 29 June:
 Robert Redford looks every inch the Kennedyesque venturer into politics in Michael Ritchie's The Candidate. He plays the apolitical California lawyer whose self-effacing good looks ease him into a senatorial seat. Along the way he is dismayed to find that his values and lifestyle must change to accomodate his new role. Karen Carlson is the wife cut adrift during the campaign, and Peter Boyle is superb as the campaign manager happy to toss Redford's integrity out the window. Ritchie's documentary-style direction and Jeremy Larner's pungent screenplay highlight the dirty side of politics, but their distate for smoke-filled rooms suggests the kind of cop-out liberalism that would prefer to do without politics altogether.
- Denver, 7 July: Brandon de Wilde, aged 30, was killed in a car accident yesterday. De Wilde made his Broadway debut at age seven in The Member of the Wedding, and took the role to the screen in 1952. He will be best remembered for his first-class performances in Shane (1953) and Hud (1963).
- Hollywood, 7 July: Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown have resigned from Warner Bros were they had been in charge of production for the last 18 months. They plan to open their own production company, the Zanuck-Brown Company.
- Hanoi, 14 July: Jane Fonda has chosen Hanoi to kick off a trip to North Vietnam. During the first of 10 scheduled radio broadcasts she spoke critically of President Nixon and the Amercan government's political stance in Vietnam. Many Americans consider her attitude defeatist, and some have accused the star of treason for telling the U.S. troops that "the men who order you to use your weapons are war criminals in the eyes of international law."
- Washington, DC, 18 July: Frank Sinatra has given evidence at the U.S. House of Representatives to a commission of inquiry into organized crime.
- New York, 30 July:
 John Boorman's Deliverance is a nightmarish adaptation of poet-novelist James Dickey's book about various kinds of survival in modern America. The story concerns four Atlanta businessmen of various male stripe: Jon Voight's character is a reflective, civilized fellow, Burt Reynolds plays a strapping hunter-gatherer in urban clothes, Ned Beatty is a sweaty, weak-willed boy-man, and Ronny Cox essays a spirited, neighborly type. Together they decide to answer the ancient call of men testing themselves against the elements and set out on a treacherous ride on the rapids of an Appalachian river before a new dam turns the whole valley into an artificial lake. What they don't understand until it is too late is that they have ventured into Dickey's variation on the American underbelly, a wild, lawless, dangerous (and dangerously inbred) place isolated from the gloss of the late 20th century. In short order, the four men dig deep into their own suppressed primitiveness, defending themselves against armed cretins, facing the shock of real death on their carefully planned, death-defying adventure, and then squarely facing the suspicions of authority over their concealed actions. As the time approached to shoot the disturbing rape scene, in which Ned Beatty is forced to "squeal like a pig," the filmmakers offered Beatty the choice of not doing the scene. After much thought, Beatty opted to film it as written, and the result is one of the most frightening scenes in American cinema. Boorman, a master teller of stories about individuals on peculiarly mythical journeys, does a terrifying and beautiful job of revealing the complexity of private and collective character -- the way one can never be the same after glimpsing the sharp-clawed survivor in one's soul.
- Washington, DC, 17 August: Everybody involved in the making of Deep Throat has been charged with violating the law prohibiting the movement of pornographic material from one state to another.
 - New York, 13 September: Peter Barnes adapts his irreverent play to the screen for director Peter Medak's The Ruling Class. The 13th Earl of Gurney (Harry Andrews), a member of the House of Lords, dies in a shockingly silly way, leaving his estate to his son, Jack (Peter O'Toole). Unfortunately, Jack is insane: he thinks he is Jesus Christ. How does he know he's the Son of God? "When I pray I find I'm talking to myself." The other somewhat-more respectable members of the family place Jack under psychiatric observation and plot to steal the estate from him. And Tucker, the butler (Arthur Lowe), shows his true socialist leanings after he's generously endowed by the dead Earl's will. Loaded with idiosyncratic touches from eccentric camera angles to unexpected outbursts of song, the film creates an experience nearly as inspired and mad as O'Toole's brilliantly hilarious central performance. The film's devilish invention may at times seem overloaded, but most drawbacks are redeemed by the sharpness of the satire, particularly during the memorably disturbing finale.
- Rome, 7 October: Pier Paolo Pasolini's film, based on the ribald classic by Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, is under judicial impoundment.
- New York, 15 October:
 Federico Fellini's ode to the city of Rome is far from a coherent narrative, but as a selection of images and sounds celebrating the famed Italian capital, it's dazzling and hugely enjoyable. Stylistically, it showcases the true love that Fellini has for the Eternal City. Mixing autobiographical flashbacks with the travails of a present-day movie company making a film about the city (headed up by Fellini himself), Roma is an impressionistic tour de force, delivered via Fellini's unique cinematic vision. If you can't tolerate Fellini's larger-than-life approach, the sometimes-garish colors, or the circus atmosphere, you'll probably find Roma insufferable. But fans of Fellini will be in seventh heaven, especially during some of the wonderful set pieces -- a music dance hall performance that's interrupted by bombing during World War II; a papal fashion show that's so surreal it must be seen to be believed; and a breathtaking sequence in which the film crew, tagging along with an archaeological dig, happens upon an ancient Roman catacomb and watches as the beautiful murals disintegrate before their eyes. Through it all, Fellini's passion for Rome (and moviemaking) shines through, especially in the film's climax, a dialogue-free sequence of motorcycles roaring through the city at night, a tour that ends at the magnificent Colosseum. At that marriage of past and present, Roma is about as perfect as cinema can get.
 - New York, 9 November: 1776, the film version of Peter Stone's Broadway musical comedy of the same name, premiers today. In the days leading up to July 4, 1776, Continental Congressmen John Adams (William Daniels) and Benjamin Franklin (Howard Da Silva) coerce Thomas Jefferson (Ken Howard) into writing the Declaration of Independence as a delaying tactic as they try to persuade the American colonies to support a resolution on independence. As George Washington sends depressing messages describing one military disaster after another, the businessmen, landowners and slave holders in Congress all stand in the way of the Declaration, and a single "nay" vote will forever end the question of independence. Large portions of spoken and sung dialogue are taken directly from the letters and memoirs of the actual participants. Peter H. Hunt directs his first feature film.
- Paris, 11 November: The French Catholic Film Board has decided to relax its ratings system. The rating "not to be seen" may no longer be used.
- Hollywood, 9 December: Columnist Louella Parsons, the highly influential gossip writer, has died aged 91. Apart from her frequent scoops, Parsons also wrote two volumes of memoirs and appeared in several films, the last being Starlift in 1951.
- Bavaria, 9 December: Director William Dieterle has died. He lived and worked in Hollywood, where his films included A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Story of Louis Pasteur (both 1935), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and Portrait of Jennie (1948).
- Paris, 15 December:
 The cinematic event of the moment in Paris is the release of Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci's first film since The Conformist two years ago. This screenplay follows a simple line. Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider are two strangers who meet by chance inside an empty Paris apartment, where they suddenly and passionately make love. They subsequently embark on further erotic encounters in the apartment, agreeing never to talk about their lives or reveal their names, in order to keep the relationship anonymous and exclusively physical. However, it is revealed that she is about to be married to a young TV filmmaker (Jean-Pierre Léaud), while Brando is attempting to understand the recent unexplained suicide of his wife. The main focus of this disturbing picture is the painful, joyless and loveless coupling of Brando and Schneider, most controversially using butter in a sodomy scene. And Brando, freed from the restrictions of Hollywood, delivers his most mature, powerful and committed performance.
 - Los Angeles, 16 December: In The Poseidon Adventure an ocean liner the side of the Queen Mary is capsized by a freak wave and turns upside down. Nearly all of the passengers, whooping it up in the ship's dining room, are killed, but 10 survive the disaster. Led by two-fisted priest Gene Hackman, they thread their way through the upside-down world of the liner, from top to bottom, in search of escape. The intriguing inverted sets designed by William Creber camouflage most of the movie's dramatic implausibility, while the steadily rising water injects a healthy measure of tension. The sets were mounted on slanted tracks that were gradually lowered into water tanks while Hackman and fellow cast members Jack Albertson, Ernest Borgnine, Roddy McDowall, Red Buttons, Carol Lynley, Stella Stevens, Arthur O'Connell, Shelley Winters, and Pamela Sue Martin emoted furiously.
- New York, 22 December: U.S. release of Ingmar Bergman's Viskningar och rop (Cries and Whispers) starring Harriet Andersson, Kari Sylvan, Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann. The film is scheduled to be released in Sweden on 5 March of next year.
- Lisbon, 26 December: Release of O Passado e o Presente (The Past and the Present), by Manoel de Oliveira, with Maria de Saisset and Barbara Vieira.
|
2 January - Southern Australia,