- Paris, 10 January: The Communist Deputy Jack Ralite protested in the National Assembly about the meager share of the state budget (0.049 percent) allocated to the French film industry.
- Paris, 11 January:
 The Louis Delluc Prize has been awarded this year to L'Horloger de Saint Paul (The Watchmaker of St. Paul), the first feature by the former critic and press officer, 33-year-old Bertrand Tavernier. The director, an admirer of the best of pre-New Wave French cinema, employed the veteran writing team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, after 10 years of silence from them. They have come up with a well-crafted and intelligent screenplay based on the Georges Simenon novel titled L'Horloger d'Everton and set in Tavernier's hometown of Lyons. It concerns a watchmaker (Philippe Noiret), living a quiet life in St. Paul, a suburb of Lyons, who is stunned when he learns that his son is wanted for the murder of a factory owner. Pestered by a police inspector (Jean Rochefort), he is gradually forced to reconsider his life as a man and father. Tavernier has the controlled style and acute observation of his idol, Jacques Becker. The social detail and the almost imperceptible pshychological hints, plus the interplay between Noiret and Rochefort, make this an impressive debut.
- Mexico, 17 January: The Mexican Cinémathèque, which has been organized on the French Cinémathèque model, opened today with great ceremony.
- Avoriaz, 28 January: The main prize at the second International Festival of Fantasy Films was awarded to Richard Fleischer's Soylent Green.
- Paris, 31 January:
 Louis Malle's new film, Lacombe Lucien, could be considered the first French feature to air the thorny subject of collaboration during the Occupation, already dealt with in a documentary form by Marcel Ophuls' Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity (1971). It focuses on Lucien, a 17-year-old peasant of mean intelligence, who falls in with the Gestapo and moves in with a Jewish family in hiding. The director treats Lucien with cool objectivity, revealing the banality of his repellent actions. The wartime atmosphere of an occupied provincial town is authentic, and the terrifying dilemma of the family, at the mercy of their young captor, is expressed with subtlety and sympathy. The performances are brilliant, notably from Holger Löwenadler as the once fashionable Jewish tailor, and from Pierre Blaise, in the title role, a young peasant from the region, discovered by Malle.
 - New York, 7 February: The range reverberates to the sound of flatulence in Mel Brooks's hilarious spoof Western, Blazing Saddles. Brooks mines every cliché of the genre with immense gusto, kicking off with an over-the-top Frankie Laine theme song and a black railroad construction gang singing "I Get a Kick Out of You." He then turns every kind of racial stereotype upside down, casting himself as state governor and in a cameo as a Jewish Indian chief; Cleavon Little as the fashion-plate black sheriff drinking his whiskey from a wineglass; and, the star of the proceedings, Gene Wilder as the Waco Kid, Little's sidekick. Villainy is supplied by Harvey Korman's crooked speculator Hedley Lamarr and glamor in the shapely form of Dietrich-like saloon singer Madeline Kahn. And the flatulence? That's caused by the campfire diet of Brooks' motley bunch of Hollywood cowpunchers.
- France, 20 February: Funds of 3.6 million francs have been allocated to the Film Archives Service to build three new special storage vaults to take 55,000 reels of highly flammable nitrate film.
- Munich, 5 March:
 Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Angst essen Seele auf (Fear Eats the Soul) is a realistic portrait of particular problems that are prevailing in the working-class milieu of contemporary Germany. It tells the story of Ali, a lonely Moroccan mechanic, who is befriended by Emmi, a lonely widowed cleaning lady years older than he. Despite the hostility that surrounds them, the relationship blossoms into love and marriage, whereupon the couple are reviled and pilloried by the community. The film explores racial, and other, prejudices in a clear and accessible narrative and, as played by El Hedi Ben Salem and Brigitte Mira, is a salutary and heartbreaking experience for audiences.
- Hollywood, 7 March: Wildwood Productions, Robert Redford's company, has acquired the rights to the Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward book, All the President's Men, for $450,000. About the events in the Watergate scandal, it was published last month.
 - Paris, 20 March: Bertrand Blier's third feature, Les Valseuses (Going Places), could become the film that best represents those socially, morally and sexually liberated young people who emerged from the tumultuous events of May 1968. The director (the son of the well-known roly-poly screen actor Bernard Blier) has adpated his own 1972 novel, the French title of which is slang for testicles. The movie's "heroes" are two young layabouts (Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere), who steal cars and break into houses, usually as a prelude to abducting, seducing and otherwise exploiting women. While they're on the run, they take up with a sexy but frigid hairdresser (Miou-Miou) with whom they form a strange ménage à trois. (Dewaere's character has had an accident that makes him impotent.) They also come across Jeanne Moreau as a just-released jailbird. Blier follows his amoral protagonists in a jaunty manner -- Stéphane Grappelli's swinging score undercutting the anarchic situations -- without condemnation or praise, though the charm of the actors inclines to the latter. Although this is his 15th movie, 25-year-old Depardieu only now reveals himself as a star of the future, as do Dewaere, a year older, and 24-year-old Miou-Miou, who had been spotted in a cafe-theater. Les Valseuses is considered to be an important break-through in French cinema because of the unconstrained nature of the characters, the sexual scenes and the dialogue. It is certain to be a success at the box office even though it is forbidden to those under 18 years of age.
- New York, 24 March:
 Terrence Malick, who impressed last year with his screenplay for Stuart Rosenberg's modern Western Pocket Money, has turned director with Badlands. The script was based upon the true story of the Charles Starkweather and Caril-Ann Fugate murders in 1958. In Malick's film, Kit Carruthers, a young garbage collector and his girlfriend Holly Sargis from Fort Dupree, South Dakota, are on the run after killing Holly's father who disagreed with their relationship. On their way towards the Badlands of Montana they leave a trail of dispassionate and seemingly random murders. The great spaces of the American heartland are the backdrop to the doomed rebellion of simpleminded smalltown cheerleader Sissy Spacek and denim-clad James Dean lookalike Martin Sheen. Malick, a former Rhodes scholar and journalist, counterpoints their world of tawdry dreams with the iconography of the period in a picture of studied irony and ravishing beauty, with cinematography headed by Tak Fujimoto.
- New York, 26 March: Premier of Jack Clayton's The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. The supporting cast includes Bruce Dern, Karen Black, Sam Waterston, Howard Da Silva and Edward Herrmann.
- New York, 31 March: Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown premiere their production of Steven Spielberg's first feature film as director, The Sugarland Express. Goldie Hawn and William Atherton play a young couple who, after some bad breaks and mistakes, have their child taken away by the state of Texas. So they take the law into their own hands and take off to retrieve him, on the run from the police -- lots and lots of police -- all the while turning themselves into a cause célèbre.
 - Los Angeles, 2 April:
 It was gratifying, at this year's Oscar® celebrations to see the Academy honoring the contribution of foreigners to the film industry. The Swede Sven Nykvist won the Best Cinematography award for Ingmar Bergman's film Viskningar och rop (Cries and Whispers), François Truffaut's La Nuit américaine (Day for Night) was the Foreign Language Film winner, and Henri Langlois, the head of the French Cinémathèque, received an honorary Oscar®. Back on home ground, The Sting took seven awards, including Best Picture and Best Director (George Roy Hill). Jack Lemmon was Best Actor for Save the Tiger, while Glenda Jackson won her second Best Actress Oscar® for A Touch of Class. Supporting Acting awards went to John Houseman for The Paper Chase and little Tatum O'Neal for Paper Moon.
As co-host David Niven was introducing Elizabeth Taylor, who was to hand out the statuette for Best Picture, a naked man streaked across the stage. Niven was amused -- and prepared: "Ladies and gentlemen, that was bound to happen. Just think, the only laugh that man will probably ever get is for stripping and showing off his shortcomings." Jack Haley Jr., producer of the Awards Show, denied the streaking had been planned. "I would have used a pretty girl instead."
- Rome, 5 April:
 The title of Federico Fellini's latest film, Amarcord, in Roman dialect means "I remember." This is related to the director's own memories of his childhood in the seaside town of his childhood in the seaside town of Rimini, where he was born. Fellini has already dealt, more realistically, with his early days in the town in I Vitelloni (1953), and touched on his youth elsewhere, but Amarcord is his most affectionate semi-autobiographical film. It is an often dreamlike vision of the past, as well as a bawdy, funny and melancholy one. The episodic screenplay revolves around one family during the fascist era in the 1930s. It consists of an irascible anti-fascist father, a domineering, long-suffering mother, her layabout brother, a petomaniac grandfather, an insane uncle and Titta, the sex-obsessed teenage son. The parade of inhabitants of the town includes Gradisca (Magali Noël), a seductive hairdresser, who dreams of marrying Gary Cooper some day. Among the inspired set pieces is the visit of an Emir and his harem to the local grand hotel, a youth rally to greet Benito Mussolini, and the vision of the Rex, an immense transatlantic luxury liner looming into view to the delight of the townspeople in their small boats. Nino Rota's distinctive music and Danilo Donati impressionistic art direction add to that very special Fellini flavor.
- Paris, 18 April:
 Marcel Pagnol has died at his home in Paris. The 69-year-old writer and filmmaker leaves us with the image of a man deeply attached to his native Provence, which he depicted with honesty and warmth in films such as La Femme du boulanger (1938), Manon des sources (1953) and the early classic Topaze (1933). Pagnol was also the first film director to become a member of the Académie Française.
- Massachusetts, 2 May: Steven Spielberg has started filming Jaws on location at Martha's Vineyard. The movie, based on a book by Peter Benchley, is the first independent production from Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown.
- Hollywood, 6 May: A fire has destroyed part of the Samuel Goldwyn studios, causing $3 million worth of damage.
- Cambridge, 10 May: The satirical magazine The Harvard Lampoon has awarded the prize for the worst actor of 1973 to Barbra Streisand for her performance in The Way We Were.
- New York, 23 May: MGM premieres its compilation documentary That's Entertainment!. Hosts Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly, Peter Lawford, Liza Minnelli, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra, James Stewart and Elizabeth Taylor reminisce about their days at the studio and introduce clips from such films as Words and Music, The Wizard of Oz, An American in Paris, Gigi, Singin' in the Rain, Show Boat (1936) and (1951) and Broadway Melody,
- Cannes, 24 May:
 Two young American directors have figured strongly at the Cannes Festival this year, one of them already established and the other a feature film debutant. Francis Ford Coppola, whose The Godfather made such an impact a couple of years ago, has now offered a much smaller-scale but no less impressive work with The Conversation. This intriguing post-Watergate thriller, about an expert in bugging devices who investigates a murder plot, won the Grand Prix. Gene Hackman is splendid as the eavesdropper being bugged himself, and Coppola moves seamlessly from the physical to the metaphysical. After the mark he made with the made-for TV Duel in 1971, the 27-year-old Steven Spielberg has come up with his first feature work, The Sugarland Express, for which Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins gained the best screenplay award. Like Duel, it is also about a chase, this time a true story of a young couple (Goldie Hawn and William Atherton) pursued along the highways of Texas. The winner of the Special Jury Prize was Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Fiore delle mille e una notte (The Arabian Nights), the final and best segment of his trilogy of classic story cycles, following The Decameron (1971) and I Racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales) (1972). Shot in Yemen, Eritrea, Iran and Nepal, the film captures the beauty (landscape and people) of those countries, retaining the magical and erotic spirit of the original tales, untramelled by European religious guilt.
- New York, 17 June: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the most famous married couple in the world, have divorced. Their last picture together had a prophetic title: Divorce His, Divorce Hers. Taylor will shortly begin work on a new film, Any Wednesday.
- New York, 19 June:
 Paranoia seems contagious these days. The latest Hollywood movie to deal with the helplessness of the individual against State or corporate power, or an unholy alliance of the the two, is Alan J. Pakula's political thriller The Parallax View. Here, in a variation on the theme of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, investigative journalist Warren Beatty infiltrates a sinister organization only to discover that he has been set up as a patsy for another assassination, an outcome suggested in the picture's opening shot, where the camera tracks past a totem pole to reveal a tower block, and the title itself -- a parallax is an apparent change in the postion of an object caused by a change in the position of the observer, such as a cameraman looking through a viewfinder attached to the outside of the camera, rather than through one that views through the lens. It seems you can't trust anybody these days.
- Washington, DC, 23 June: The Supreme Court ruled against a city ordinance as "unconstitutional interference" today. The ordinance made drive-in theaters criminally liable for showing films with nude scenes if they are visible outisde the theater grounds. Justices ruled that while such films may be offensive to some, they could easily be avoided, and were no more likely to stop the traffic than scenes of violence.
- Washington, DC, 24 June: The Supreme Court has ruled that the film Carnal Knowledge is not obscene. This ruling quashes a previous decision handed down by a court in Georgia.
- Chicago, 13 July: Chicago's best-known movie theater, the Biograph, has gone out quietly almost 40 years to the day after the violent death of its most famous patron John Dillinger. The flamboyant Dillinger, known as "Public Enemy No. 1," died in a gunfight with Federal agents outside the Biograph where he had been watching Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama. Trivia fans will remember that he sat in the middle of the 12th row, handy to the exit. Sadly, the Biograph was no longer economically viable.
- Cairo, 26 August:
 Imprisoned in a cage by the Egyptian censors for more than a year, Al-Usfur (The Sparrow), directed by Youssef Chahine, has finally been released, thanks to a formidable mobilization of Egyptian intellectuals in favor of this film and its director. Its showing here is a cultural event of major importance. In fact, it is the first film to make reference to the Six Day War of 1967, which the Arabs lost to Israel. Several parallel stories are told through the eyes of ordinary people, their suffering, their mourning and their anger during the week that shook the Arab world. They gather in a house from where a sparrow -- symbol of the Egyptian people -- is released. Stylistically adventurous, the film is politically explosive in that it attempts to show how the war was lost from within the country, as well as being a cry for solidarity among the oppressed. Chahine's pleas are couched in an imaginative cinematic language that grips the attention while making its didactic points perfectly. Egyptian cinema has found its voice.
- Paris, 27 August: The President of France, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, said during an interview on television that film censorship would be abolished in the near future.
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- New York, 28 August:
 Like many European directors who preceded him, Roman Polanski has realized his dream of making an American film noir with Chinatown. Set in Los Angeles in 1937, it has an extremely complicated plot, in which crimes and corruption are unpeeled like onion skins as it runs its gripping 131-minute course, with a murder on the outside and a land-grabbing fraud at the core. The film stars Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes, a gumshoe who suspects and then protects a beautiful widow (Faye Dunaway at her most icily glamorous), whose tycoon father (John Huston) is plotting to control L.A.'s water supply. Not long into this film, Nicholson has a nostril slit by one of the villainous Huston's pint-sized henchmen (portrayed by Polanski himself), and has to play the rest of the movie with a conspicuous white bandage covering his nose. It is a visual coup that makes Nicholson's drily humorous character even more memorable. Polanski has created a murky world, haunted by the past, both of its setting and that of the cinema itself. When Nicholson was asked why he allowed his director to dictate his performance in Chinatown to an extent where colleagues half-expected the actual takes to be delivered in a Polish accent, Nicholson replied "because the little bastard's a genius".
 - Austin, 1 October: Director Tobe Hooper, who as a child gorged himself on films in his father's Texas moviehouse, serves up a bloody feast in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's a grisly tale of travelers in rural America who fall into the clutches of a hellish inversion of the all-American family -- three ghoulish brothers and their blood-sucking skeleton of a father. Like Psycho, the movie owes something to the real-life career of the "Wisconsin Ghoul," mass murderer Ed Gein, but it derives its considerable power from Hooper's assured camerawork and editing -- the sensational title belies the fact that there is very little on-screen bloodletting -- and an eerie musique concrète score which Hooper co-wrote with Wayne Bell. In part the film is a heavily ironic comment on the perversion of the "pioneer" ethic beloved of Americans: its deranged latter-day "frontiersmen" decorate their cabins with severed limbs and hunt humans rather than buffalo. Made for less than $200,000 with a largely non-professional cast, the film is certain to gross in the millions.
- Paris, 2 October: A special soiree in honor of Woody Allen was held at the Chaillot Cinémathèque. The film chosen for the evening, Sleeper, was selected by Allen himself: "Perhaps my least successful film with the French public but the one I like the best."
- New York, 2 October:
 At the best of times the New York subway is a hostile environment, but it becomes positively lethal in Joseph Sargent's pulsating thriller, The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three. A gang led by ruthless Robert Shaw hijacks a subway train and holds its passengers hostage while demanding that a million dollars in cash be delivered within the hour. Can Walter Matthau's Transport Authority man thwart them? Peter Stone's crackling screenplay, adapted from John Godey's bestseller, swoops from black comedy to heart-stopping thrills while Sargent screws the tension up to breaking point.
 - London, 30 October: Charles Chaplin has compiled a companion volume to My Autobiography (1964). The new book, My Life in Pictures, comes out today.
- Los Angeles, 1 November: Release of Earthquake, directed by Mark Robson, with Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner and Geneviève Bujold. The film is the first to be made in "Sensurround." This process works by emitting such deep sound that it is almost inaudible but at extremely powerful levels so that the vibrations are felt by the body.
- New York, 8 November: Frank Yablans has surprised the film world by resigning from his position as president of Paramount Pictures. Barry Diller, who became chairman last October, now finds himself in charge of the studio.
- Santiago, 29 November: Chilean actress Carmen Bueno and leading cameraman Jorge Muller have been arrested in Santiago by the DINA, Pinochet's political police.
- London, 6 December: World premiere of Guy Hamilton's latest James Bond, The Man with the Golden Gun, with Roger Moore once again playing Agent 007.
- Hollywood, 11 December: MGM's profits for the year 1973-74 have risen by 190 percent compared to the previous year. This result is in large part due to its hotel-casino, the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
- New York, 18 December:
 Movie companies have been rediscovering a genre that was popular in the late 1930s, when such titles as San Francisco (1936) with its 1906 eathquake sequence, The Good Earth (1937) with its plague of locusts, and The Rains Came (1939) rated highly with audiences. Now, able to take advantage of the latest advances in special effects, the Hollywood studios are once again promoting disasters in a big way. Universal initiated the new cycle with the highly successful Airport in 1970, and Fox followed with The Poseidon Adventure in 1972. Now things have been really heating up with the release of Airport 1975 and Earthquake, which introduces a new sensation to movie audiences -- sound that is felt in the body and seats equipped to shake at key moments in the film so filmgoers can share the sensations experienced by the actors on the screen. Most recently we have been treated to The Towering Inferno in which a starry cast, that includes Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, O. J. Simpson, Robert Vaughn and Robert Wagner, are trapped by fire in the penthouse restaurant at the top of the world's tallest building.
- Rome, 20 December: Release of Luchino Visconti's latest film, Gruppo de famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece), with Burt Lancaster and Silvana Mangano.
- New York, 25 December: An editorial criticizing The Godfather I and II has appeared in the New York Times. The films are described as "breaking the record for pornography and violence." The article is concerned with the television screening of the first Godfather and its effect on young viewers.
- New Delhi, 30 December: Opening of the fifth Indian Film Festival, presided over by Satyajit Ray. From now on the festival is to be held annually. The Indian film Siddhartha is causing controversy due to a semi-nude scene.
- Paris, 31 December: Four American films -- The Hustler, The Exorcist, Robin Hood and Papillon -- appear in the list of France's Top Ten box-office hits for the year.
- New York, 31 December: Box office receipts, unadjusted for inflation, appear to be the highest on record, while distribution receipts are up 25 percent from last year.
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The announcement yesterday by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing of the lifting of most film censorship has particularly delighted the producers and distributors of pornographic movies, a side of the industry that is flourishing. In fact, the mode for porno has been in full swing for some time, and business has never been better. Some of the better porno movies have left the "ghetto" of specialized theaters, even making it to the prestigious picture palaces along the Champs Elysées, as well as those cinemas in the Latin Quarter usually designated for art movies. This has been the case with Emmanuelle, which is an unprecedented box-office triumph for this type of film since it was released two months ago. In addition, Sylvia Kristel, the 22-year-old Dutch actress in the title role, has become, in a matter of weeks, a real star of the screen. The phenomenal success of this soft-core picture can be attributed to the fact that the producers and the director, Just Jaeckin, chose a professional cast (including an actor of the quality of Alain Cuny), had a relatively large budget, and avoided any hard-core sex scenes. Jean-Louis Richard's screenplay deals with Emmanuelle, the bored wife of a French embassy official in Bangkok, who is urged by her libertine husband to explore all the possibilities of sex. Thus, she finds herself in bed with, among others, a lesbian archeologist and an elderly roué.
A couple of other recent movies, deemed soft-core, but from well respected auteurs, have followed in the wake of Emmanuelle. The latest film by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Glissements progressifs du plaisir, slides progressively further along the porn road than his previous ventures into erotic fantasy. And just released today is Walerian Borowczyk's Immoral Tales, reflecting the Polish director's fascination with the iconography of erotica and the emotions that lie beneath it. The film tells four stories, each situtated in a different century. One involves Lucrezia Borgia's seduction of Pope Alexander VI, and another a virgin discovering masturbation.
30 July - Lincoln, NE, 
21 March - Stanton, CA,