Fear Over the City

Shot in the autumn of 1974 and released in France the following spring, the French-Italian crime thriller Peur sur la ville (Fear Over the City) was helmed by a director who also had a hand in writing it, alongside co-writers Francis Veber and Jean Laborde. The plot centers on a Paris police commissioner tracking a serial killer terrorizing the capital; the part marked the first time its lead actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo, took on a police role on screen. The supporting cast includes Charles Denner, Adalberto Maria Merli and Lea Massari, along with Jean-François Balmer in one of his earliest screen appearances, plus Giovanni Cianfriglia, André Valardy and Henry Djanik in smaller parts.

The picture is remembered for its dangerous stunt work, all performed personally by its star, most notably a sequence atop a moving metro carriage as it crosses the Bir-Hakeim bridge. Backed by a sizable promotional budget, it became the top-grossing release in France that year, drawing well over eight hundred thousand admissions in Paris alone. For English-speaking markets it was retitled and trimmed down to a noticeably shorter running time.