General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Peur sur la ville

Peur sur la ville is a 1975 French-Italian police thriller directed by Henri Verneuil, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo as a Paris police commissioner hunting a serial killer who murders women he judges morally depraved. It was released in France on 9 April 1975 and is remembered above all for the stunts Belmondo performed himself, including a chase across the roof of a moving Paris metro train.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Henri Verneuil, with a screenplay by Verneuil, Jean Laborde, and Francis Veber³
Principal cast	Jean-Paul Belmondo (commissaire Jean Letellier), Charles Denner (inspector Moissac), Adalberto Maria Merli (Pierre Valdeck/Minos), Lea Massari (Nora Elmer), Rosy Varte (Germaine Doizon)⁴
Release	France, 9 April 1975; CNC visa no. 43334 dated 4 April 1975, classification "Tous publics"¹
Production	Cerito Films (Paris) and Mondial Te.Fi. (Roma); original distributor AMLF³
Music	Ennio Morricone³
French admissions	3,948,746⁵
Signature stunt	Belmondo on the roof of a metro train crossing the Bir-Hakeim viaduct, filmed at up to 70 km/h at 50 meters of height²

Spoilers

Plot

Nora Elmer, a woman living on the seventeenth floor of a high-rise tower in Paris, receives threatening telephone calls from a man who denounces her private life and announces he is coming. Frightened, she suffers a heart attack and falls to her death from her window. Commissaire Jean Letellier is put in charge of the investigation, but he is preoccupied with Marcucci, a gangster he has been trying to arrest for two years since a robbery gone wrong.⁶

Letellier is then contacted by a man calling himself Minos, a reference to the first book of Dante's Divine Comedy. Minos claims the murder of Nora and announces a campaign to eliminate women whose sexual lives he considers depraved; behind his dark glasses he hides a glass eye, and each night he harasses single women by telephone before attacking them.⁶^•⁴ The film's tension comes partly from this double pursuit: as one contemporary reviewer noted, the policeman spends much of the film pursuing a personal vendetta against the gangster while the serial-killer case continues in parallel.⁷

Production and crew

Verneuil wrote the film with Jean Laborde and Francis Veber, who wrote the dialogue. It was produced by Cerito Films in Paris and Mondial Te.Fi. in Rome, with Jean Penzer as cinematographer, Pierre Gillette as editor, and Jean André as production designer.³ The CNC record lists the film as a French-Italian co-production with a visa dated 4 April 1975 and a runtime of 128 minutes; AlloCiné and the Cinémathèque française give 2h05 and 125 minutes respectively, a small discrepancy between sources.¹^•⁶^•³

The Paris the film shows is deliberately modern: towers of forty floors, glass and concrete apartment blocks and offices that, in the words of Le Monde critic Jacques Siclier in April 1975, take on the look of New York or Chicago. Siclier also observed that Verneuil was then the only French director able to make a film in France with a Hollywood-style production.⁸

The stunts

Belmondo performed every stunt in the film himself. The INA archive of a March 1975 set report records that the scenes were shot without special effects, a deliberate choice by Verneuil, who said that trickery "removes credibility from action scenes".² The most famous sequence has Letellier running along the roof of a moving metro train on the elevated line crossing the Bir-Hakeim viaduct; the run was calculated to reach 70 km/h at a height of 50 meters, filmed at the Bir-Hakeim station in Paris. Belmondo later described the sensation as a "small pinch of fear, like when you go on stage", and Verneuil admitted the shoot had frightened him.²

Other celebrated sequences include a pursuit across the rooftops of Paris and the Galeries Lafayette, and an assault in which Belmondo, suspended beneath a helicopter on a cable, storms an apartment through the window where the strangler is holding hostages; that sequence was shot with the help of the gendarmerie intervention brigade.⁷^•⁸ A fan-compiled tally puts the stunt set pieces at roughly fifteen minutes of the film in total: about five minutes on the rooftops, five on the metro roof, and two each hanging from a balcony and from a helicopter.⁹

The film's poster also has a place in Belmondo's career: it was the first poster on which his name appeared in large capital letters, a typography reused for the promotional material of many of his later films.⁶

Music

The score is by Ennio Morricone, built around a pulsing main theme that recurs in several variations through the film. The soundtrack review site UnderScores describes it as a suffocating musical mechanism that gives body to the killer's psychosis, and the theme is often cited among the Italian composer's most striking.¹⁰

Reception

The film drew a reserved response from critics but found a large audience: it sold 3,948,746 tickets in France, and one retrospective account places it as the second-highest-grossing French film of 1975 behind The Towering Inferno.⁵^•¹¹ AlloCiné users currently rate it 3.7 out of 5 from more than 7,600 ratings.⁶

Retrospective standing has grown. Time Out placed it 77th in its ranking of the 100 best French films of all time, calling it an absolute classic of French action cinema and comparing Belmondo's willingness to take physical risks to Jackie Chan and Buster Keaton.⁷ Reviewers commonly single out the stunts, Denner's understated performance as Moissac, and Merli's unsettling killer, while noting that the plot itself is conventional and that some characters, notably Moissac, remain underdeveloped.¹² In the United States the film was released on 21 November 1975 under the title The Night Caller.¹³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026