- London, 5 January:
 After being "locked up" for two years by Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, the controversial work Performance, co-directed by screenwriter Donald Cammell and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, has finally reached the screen in a heavily edited version. James Fox plays a gangster's enforcer, a bemused Caliban to Mick Jagger's contemporary Prospero, a washed-up rock star planning a comeback from his shuttered Notting Hill mansion. The two men meet and gradually merge personalities in a complex and fitfully brilliant parable influenced by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges.
- Paris, 14 January: Eric Losfeld, editor of the film magazine Positif as well as numerous books on the cinema, has been fined by the courts for publishing material classified as "pornographic."
- New York, 16 January: MGM and Fox have let it be known that the merger project concerning the two companies, first suggested to Darryl F. Zanuck by James Aubret, the president of MGM, has now been dropped.
- Washington, DC, 22 January: President Nixon has given his seal of approval to Arthur Hiller's Love Story. Chatting informally to newsmen this morning at the White House, he said he had enjoyed the film, and added "I recommend it." But he did say that he had been mildly upset by its profanity.
- Hollywood, 25 January: Charles Keating, the leader of the anti-pornographic crusade, has declared that "Darryl Zanuck and Russ Meyer should be arrested and imprisoned for daring to make Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." Russ Meyer had already made a name for himself as a controversial filmmaker in 1968 with Vixen, a $75,000 film that has, to date, grossed an impressive $5 million.
- Washington, DC, 2 February: The American Film Institute has published a guide to film courses available in the U.S. It lists 1,679 courses taught at 300 American colleges and universities.
- Paris, 26 February:
 Fernandel, the great horse-faced French comic, died today of lung cancer at 4:30 p.m. in his apartment on the Avenue Foch. He suffered an attack of pleurisy a few months ago, and thus had to interrupt the shooting of the new Don Camillo film, directed by Christian-Jaque. Born Fernand Contandin on 8 May 1903 in Marseilles, he made 144 films in his career, among the most popular being the Don Camillo series, in which he played a lovable Catholic priest at war with the town's Communist mayor. It was Marcel Pagnol who gave Fernandel the opportunity to emerge as a wonderful tragicomic actor in Angèle, Harvest and The Well-Digger's Daughter. Fernandel also appeared in Paris Holiday opposite Bob Hope, and turned up in Around the World in 80 Days. His last completed film was Happy as Ulysses, released last year. A few hours before his death, he drank his daily glass of pastis, at a plate of bouillabaisse, his favorite dish, and then took a nap.
 - New York, 11 March: Making her debut as writer-director in A New Leaf is the multi-talented Elaine May, former comedy partner of Mike Nichols. She co-stars, too, as the shortsighted, klutzy botanist whose inherited fortune attracts the attention of bankrupt blueblood Walter Matthau. He marries her, with murder in mind, but love blooms along the way. A New Leaf is a charming comedy with more than a hint of the screwball classics of the 1930s. May's accident-prone heiress recalls Henry Fonda's snake-loving simpleton in The Lady Eve, but the marriage between Paramount and Elaine May has proved less amicable. She is suing the studio for interfering with the picture. Her partnership with Mike Nichols, one of the most successful satirical pairings in the history of American show business, ended in 1961 after their Broadway triumph "An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May." After writing and directing for the state, May made her screen debut as an actress in 1967, co-starring with Jack Lemmon in Luv. She now looks likely to mature into that rare Hollywood phenomenon -- a woman director with a flair for comedy.
- Cairo, 15 March: Youssef Chahine attended the opening of Al-Ikhtiyar (The Choice).
- Hollywood, 24 March: Francis Ford Coppola has started shooting The Godfather. Financing for the project was finally agreed with Paramount. At the request of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, the producer has had all references to the Mafia and Cosa Nostra eliminated from the script, based on Mario Puzo's best-selling novel about a Mafia family.
- New York, 29 March:
 Czech director Milos Forman has made an impressive American debut with Taking Off, bringing his satiric European eye to bear on the contemporary American scene. The result is an affectionate comedy that examines the chasm that exists between the generations, a theme he had explored in his own country. As exploited by the keenly observant Forman, in what amounts to a series of sketches, it is an absolute delight. The film concentrates on the way the confused middle-class parents of a teenage daughter behave when the girl runs away from her Forest Hills home to live in New York's Greenwich Village. In order to get in tune with their offspring, a Society of Parents of Fugitive Children is set up, in which the adults are introduced to marijuana, rock music, etc. Forman and his little-known cast get most comic mileage from showing the impact of the permissive society on bourgeois respectability.
 - Paris, 5 April: ORTF, the state-owned French television organization, has refused to broadcast Marcel Ophuls' documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), subtitled A Chronicle of a French Town Under the Occupation. It was to have been produced by French television, but when they got cold feet it was left to Swiss and German TV companies to put up the money. Nevertheless, it can now be seen in a number of cinemas in Paris and elsewhere around the country, and is already attracting large audiences. This remarkable four-and-a-half hour film consists largely of interviews with inhabitants of Clermont-Ferrand who lived through World War II. A probing, incisive and fluent interviewer, as well as a brilliantly accomplished documentary director, Ophuls (son of Max) ruthlessly exposes the degree of collaboration among the French citizenry. He also talks to members of the Resistance and some of the Nazi occupiers.
- Los Angeles, 15 April:
 A first-class uproar broke out at the 43rd Academy Awards ceremony when George C. Scott refused to accept the Best Actor Oscar® for his performance as the controversial World War II General George S. Patton in Franklin J. Schaffner's Patton. Scott, who 10 years ago refused a Best Supporting Actor nomination for The Hustler, has denounced the Oscars ceremony as a "meat market" that degrades the acting profession. No one doubts that Scott takes the business of acting seriously, some might say too seriously at times, but in an industry that is hooked on awards his truculent stand is unlikely to win him many friends in Hollywood. Patton was also voted Best Picture and won the Best Director prize for Schaffner. Glenda Jackson was voted Best Actress for her portrait of a "free" woman in Ken Russell's Women in Love. The great surprise of the evening was the failure of Love Story, which had received 10 nominations, to win any of the major awards. The only Oscar® that came its way was for Francis Lai's music. David Lean's ponderous film Ryan's Daughter picked up two statuettes, one for Freddie Young's cinematography and the other for John Mills, who was named Best Supporting Actor. The Best Supporting Actress award went to Helen Hayes for her performance as the twittering old stowaway in Airport. The Best Foreign Film Oscar® was won by Elio Petri's suspenseful Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion).
 - New York, 18 April: Robert Mulligan has taken gentle advantage of the new permissiveness that is abroad in films. Summer of '42 is set in a New England beach resort at vacation time. Initially, we follow a group of adolescent boys, whose preoccupation with sexual matters is largely confined to big talk, wish-fulfillment and the odd fumbled grope in the back row of the movies. The tenor of the piece changes, however, when the quietest of their number (Gary Grimes) has a poignant affair with a young woman (Jennifer O'Neill) whose husband is away on active service. Director Mulligan handles this situation with charm, humor and delicacy, as appropriate.
- Paris, 11 May: The widow of the murdered Greek Deputy Lambrakis has begun proceedings against the producers of the film Z for breach of privacy. The scenario is based on her husband's assassination.
- Cannes, 27 May:
 To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, the jury has killed two birds with one stone by awarding the two top prizes. The traditional Grand Prix was given to Joseph Losey's The Go-Between, and a special 25th anniversary prize to Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice.
 The latter is a sensitive and intelligent adaptation of Thomas Mann's novel evoking fin-de-siècle Venice to breathtaking perfection. Also beautifully realized, and reflecting English class prejudice around the same period, The Go-Between, from L. P. Hartley's novel, tells the story of a 12-year-old boy who carries love letters from a tenant farmer to the daughter of the big house.
- London, 17 June: British-born director Alfred Hitchcock is back in London after 20 years to prepare a new thriller called Frenzy. According to him, films have changed little over the years except that some are now full of tricks for the sake of tricks, and stylistic clichés. He describes himself as a puritan -- as only "a visual story teller... To me the visual is first, the oral is supplementary."
- New York, 18 June:
 The withdrawn Bruce Davison is a young man with many resentments, most of which are directed towards his overbearing mother Elsa Lanchester and boorish boss Ernest Borgnine, who might just have contrived his father's death to seize control of the family business. Davison finds a strange comfort among the rats that infest their rickety old mansion, eventually training them to his bidding. His furry friends become accomplices in robbery and their murder. Dominated by an old dark house and monstrous mother, Daniel Mann's Willard stirs memories of Psycho, though screenwriter Gilbert A. Ralston sees the movie as a "rat morality play."
- New York, 23 June: Dr. Aaron Stern has replaced Eugene Dougherty as the head of the Code and Rating Administration. Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA, has admitted the need for reforms in the Code to allow for changes in moral standards.
 - Los Angeles, 23 June: The flood of blaxploitation pictures continues with Shaft, in which Richard Roundtree plays the eponymous black private eye hired to find the kidnapped daughter of a big-time Harlem mobster. Former photographer Gordon Parks directs with his foot pressed firmly down on the sex and violence pedal. The 30-year-old Roundtree came to acting by way of a modeling career, joining the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967. His only previous film appearance was in a bit part in last year's What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?, Alan Funt's X-rated variation on the "Candid Camera" theme. Isaac Hayes provides a funky, driving musical score that really demands attention.
- Boston, 23 June:
 In Alan J. Pakula's Klute, Jane Fonda plays Bree Daniels, a high-class New York hooker who might hold the key to the diappearance of an out-of-towner. Doggedly trying to unravel the mystery is provincial private detective Donald Sutherland, the Klute of the title, who is drawn into Bree's world. During filming Fonda improvised a few of her scenes. Pakula says, "There's a scene with her psychiatrist where Jane suddenly explodes and starts talking about what she is beginning to feel for this man Klute and how it frightens her because she's so used to being in control -- and I could feel my skin crawling up my back, it was that moving and unexpected."
 - New York, 24 June: In Robert Altman's quirky Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Julie Christie plays an opium-addicted madam who teams up with blustering, two-bit gambler Warren Beatty. The latter dreams of turning a mud-caked frontier settlement into a bustling town, but he has hardly begun when he is gunned down by the agents of a sinister mining company. This is no ordinary Western. Altman allows conversations to overlap, encourages the actors to improvise and told cameraman Vilmos Zsigmond to use yellow filters for some scenes and underexpose others. Altman claims the picture is "less about the spirit of the pioneer than about the spirit of the entrepreneur."
- New York, 30 June:
 Male attitudes towards sex is the subject of Jules Feiffer's screenplay for Carnal Knowledge, directed by Mike Nichols. It follows Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel from libidinous adventures in college to the hardening sexual arteries of middle age. It's a bitter morality tale that is leaving audiences with a sour taste in their mouths. The surprise of the film is Ann-Margret, who displays a touching vulnerability as the blowzy bedmate who stokes Nicholson's dying sexual fires before they finally gutter out in a crabbed male menopause. Previously regarded as a teen-market sex kitten, the Swedish-born actress reveals hitherto unsuspected depths in her performance.
 - London, 1 July: Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson are put on the emotional rack by director John Schlesinger in Sunday, Bloody Sunday. They're both in love with the same young man, but as the object of their affections is the lumpish Murray Head, it's hard to see what all the fuss is about. There is, however, an excellent script by Penelope Gilliatt and a fine performance from Finch as the smitten homosexual Jewish doctor, a part he took over at short notice from Ian Bannen. Schlesinger's camera lingers balefully over the middle-class milieu in which the protagonists move, and will provide sociologists of the future with an anatomy of the British bourgeoisie of our times.
- Moscow, 20 July: The general director of the Moscow Film Festival has made it clear that Soviet authorities regard their festival differently from Western organizers of such affairs. In an article in Iskusstvo Kino, a cinema periodical, he is reported as saying that film festivals shoudl be seen as "serious ideological confrontations" between bourgeois and Communist views of art, and not as places for movie stars to attract publicity.
- New York, 25 July: Vincent Canby, film critic for the New York Times, has written an article exposing the practice of advertising agencies that use misleadingly edited versions of movie reviews to promote certain films.
- Sacramento, 27 August: Governor Ronald Reagan, himself a former screen actor, is aware of the film industry's needs. He has written to President Nixon, seeking the adoption of a more favorable tax law for the film business.
- Hollywood, 10 September: Pier Angeli has died aged 39. The actress is reported to have taken an overdose of barbiturates.
- London, 24 September:
 After winning the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Joseph Losey's film The Go-Between, based on L. P. Hartley's novel, sees a general release. This is the third collaboration between Losey and playwright Harold Pinter, who wrote the screenplays for The Servant and Accident. Dominic Guard plays the young messenger of the title, innocently carrying love letters between aristicratic Julie Christie and farmhand Alan Bates in the golden glow of an Edwardian summer. The inevitable tragedy that overtakes the lovers is recalled in flashback by Michael Redgrave as the boy grown old, but still numb with shock at the memory of the past. Pinter and Losey make a formidable team, outsiders who anatomize the codes and calculated circumlocutions of the class-ridden British society with a baleful eye. Losey believes that Pinter's spare dialogue "evokes the visual for me." And Pinter is quick to point out that Losey's camera "never becomes complacent."
 - New York, 3 October: Peter Bogdanovich is following in the footsteps of French New Wave directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard who wrote about movies before they started making them. He had made his screen debut in 1968 with Targets, an ingenious low-budget concoction for Roger Corman that collided aging horror star Boris Karloff with an all-American killer. His second project is the elegiac The Last Picture Show, filmed in black and white and set in the early 1950s in a dusty Texas town whose rickety moviehouse is about to close. Naturally, it's showing Red River, a Howard Hawks masterpiece about which Bogdanovich has written so eloquently as a film critic. He is able to draw surprisingly strong performances from his acting ensemble; Timothy and Sam Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan, Clu Gulager, Sharon Ullrick and Randy Quaid lead a cast, filled out by local Texas actors, that provides -- through Robert Surtees' camera -- the authentic sights, sounds and ambience of a dying small-town Texas.
- New York, 8 October:
 After having dealt with drug traffic in the United States, the American film industry has now turned its attention to the supply route from Europe in The French Connection. This tough crime movie, realistically directed by William Friedkin, is based on a true case from the files of NYPD Det. Eddie Egan -- who plays the part of Walt Simonson in the film -- and contains and incredibly exciting train-car chase through New York City. As Det. Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle, the cop who passionately hates all drug pushers, Gene Hackman creates a thoroughly convincing portrait of a crude and violent man, rare in its total lack of concession to audience sympathy. Roy Scheider is perfect as his sidekick, Det. Buddy "Cloudy" Russo.
 - New York, 17 October: French director Louis Malle's film Le Souffle au cœur (Murmur of the Heart) is a triumph of delicacy in dealing with the uncomfortable subject of incest. In truth, the film is about the pains of adolescence as experienced by 15-year-old Laurent (Benoít Ferreux). After an illness leaves him with a heart murmur, his mother (Lea Massari) takes him to a spa. There, each meets with sexual rejection, and their mutual sympathy and love culminates in bed. Set in the context of 1950s French middle-class family life, this is a truthful, funny, affectionate and oddly innocent work, in which Massari handles her task with exquisite finesse.
- Paris, 22 October: Cobblestones were thrown at the façade of the Saint-Séverin Cinema during a screening of La Guerre d'Algérie, made from news footage of the Algerian war, edited by Yves Courrières and Philippe Monnier.
- Paris, 29 October: Release of Ken Russell's film The Devils, inspired by the affair of the possessed nuns of Loudun in 1634. In accordance with an official order handed down from the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, theaters have to display a sign outside warning spectators of the cruelty and sadism of certain scenes.
- Los Angeles, 2 November: Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, respectively former president and vice-president of 20th Century-Fox, have started proceedings against the studio; they claim they were forced to resign illegally in 1970. Zanuck is demanding $14.5 million and Brown $7.5 million in damages.
- New York, 3 November:
 "If I Were a Rich Man" laments Tevye the Jewish milkman in the best-loved song from Fiddler on the Roof, the long-running stage hit about the trials and tribulations of a family who survive the pogroms of pre-revolutionary Russia. Topol, the Israeli actor who created the role in London, will not have to share Tevye's longings. In the film version, just opened here, he is a powehouse of attractive charm, humor, vitality and passion. In short, a star. Norman Jewison's lumbering film cannot destroy the Jewish jokes, poignant story and appealing music of the original, nor dampen Topol.
 - New York, 3 November: Clint Eastwood's fruitful collaboration with Don Siegel has produced Play Misty for Me, Eastwood's directing debut, in which Siegel plays a small role as a laconic bartender. He is a confidant of Eastwood's Dave Garver, the laid-back Monterey-based late-night disc jockey who gets more than he bargained for when he has a casual fling with psychotic admirer Jessica Walter. Walter, a highly regarded Broadway actress who make occasional forays into films, gives a riveting performance as a woman who just won't take no for an answer, sliding from edgy infatuation into homicidal hysteria as she stalks her increasingly twitchy prey. Eastwood's portrayal of the beleaguered hero chimes with his recent performance in Siegel's The Beguiled in which Geraldine Page amputated one of his legs. In Play Misty for Me, Walter threatens to dismember him with a meat cleaver before a well-aimed sock to the jaw sends her floating face-down out to sea to the strains of Errol Garner's title song. Since coming together in Coogan's Bluff (1968), Siegel and Eastwood have enjoyed a particularly productive partnership, but it now looks as if the latter's strong commercial personality will overwhelm his mentor. Eastwood looks as comfortable behind the camera as he does in front of it.
- Italy, 13 November: Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Decameron, based on the tales by Boccaccio, has been seized by the police by order of the state prosecutors from Ancona and Sulmona.
- Tel Aviv, 2 December:
 Italian director Vittorio De Sica emerged from a period in the creative wilderness with Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis), a haunting and tragic testament to Italy's involvement in the Holocaust. Brilliantly cast (Dominique Sanda, Helmut Berger, Lino Capolicchio) and photographed (Ennio Guarnieri), the film was voted best at Berlin, before its acclaim in the U.S. and European moviehouses. However, its opening here in Israel has particular emotional resonances for an audience all too familiar with the fate of Jews under Fascism, whose wealth and position offered no protection.
- New York, 19 December: Both the Catholic and Protestant churches have criticized the MPAA rating system as "it is now practised."
 - New York, 20 December: Safely settled ideas of taste have been disturbed by Hal Ashby's new film Harold and Maude, an oddball love affair between death-obsessed 20-year-old Bud Cort and speed-obsessed 80-year-old Ruth Gordon. She lives in a disused railroad car, he stages a hilarious succession of suicide attempts to ruffle the placid feathers of his unflappable mother, Vivian Pickles. Harold and Maude meet at a funeral -- they both like attending the last rites of total strangers -- and they get married on Ruth's 80th birthday. The screenplay is by Colin Higgins and the score is from rock troubador Cat Stevens. Thirty-five-year-old Ashby hitchhiked to California in his teens and worked his way through the movie business to be an assistant director on several William Wyler and George Stevens pictures. He won an editing Oscar® for his work on Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night (1967), then acted as associate producer on the same director's The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), and it was Jewison who gave him his chance to direct. The Landlord, made in 1970, was a quirky comedy-drama starring Beau Bridges as the rich kid who buys a Brooklyn tenement building intending to turn it into his own home and then, touched by the plight of the tenants, changes his mind.
- London, 20 December:
 Stanley Kubrick's latest project, A Clockwork Orange, will no doubt shock those who believe in the reassuring prospect of social progress. Adapted from the novel by Anthony Burgess, it's a frightening, prophetic vision of a Britain of the future in which roaming gangs of young men have adopted violence as their only way of life. In one sequence, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), a brutal teenage hood, the head of the band of Droogs, beats a woman to death with a giant phallic sculpture. Sent to prison for murder, Alex become a guinea pig in a rehabilitation program based on aversion therapy, and emerges having lost his soul. The film's controversial message seems to be that free will and individuality must be preserved at any cost. The violence, though explicitly shown, is given a stylized unreality, mainly through the use of music, such as Alex's crooning "Singin' in the Rain" while the gang commits a brutal rape, or the choral movement from Beethoven's Ninth that becomes Alex's stimulation to sadistic pleasures. Kubrick also makes stunning use of color -- harsh and glossy for the first part of the film, muted and more naturalistic after Alex has been brainwashed. McDowell is remarkable as an inverted Candide, seemingly irredeemably amoral.
 - New York, 22 December: Whether or not you can sympathize with its fascistic-vigilante approach to law enforcement, Dirty Harry (directed by star Clint Eastwood's longtime friend and directorial mentor, Don Siegel) is one hell of a cop thriller. The movie makes evocative use of its San Francisco locations as cop Harry Callahan (Eastwood) tracks the elusive "Scorpio killer" who has been terrorizing the city by the Bay. As the psychopath's trail grows hotter, Harry becomes increasingly impatient and intolerant of the frustrating obstacles (departmental red tape, individuals' civil rights) that he feels are keeping him from doing his job. A characteristically taut and tense piece of filmmaking from Siegel, it also creates a fascinating piece of American pop culture. This movie obviously reflects --or exploits -- the almost obsessive or paranoid fears and frustrations many Americans feel about crime in the streets. At a time when "law and order" has become a familiar slogan for political candidates, Harry Callahan may represent neither, but from his point of view his job is simple: stop criminals. To him that end justifies any means he deems necessary.
- Moscow, 26 December: Soviet censors have lifted a ban on the politically controversial film Andrei Rublev. It was made in 1969 by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, and won an award in 1970 at Cannes, but was judged too sensitive for Russian audiences.
- Hollywood, 28 December: The Viennese-born composer Max Steiner has died, aged 83. During his long career, Steiner composed the music for films as varied as Gone With the Wind and King Kong. He actually won the coveted Academy Award three times.
- Tokyo, 28 December: Japan's oldest production company, Nikkatsu, has decided to launch a new series of romantic-cum-pornographic films to avoid bankruptcy.
- Paris, 31 December: During the past year, 392 feature films were televised here. Of these, 196 were French-made.
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8 April - Denmark,