Skip through the special features on the DVD of Peter Yates Bullitt (1968) and you'll find an interesting featurette entitled Steve McQueen's Commitment to Reality ; a promo made at the time of the film's production. As this quaint little curio unspools, we're told that McQueen had driven the iconic Ford Mustang for real during the [then] seminal car chases and the viewer is given the impression that the film's star is really something special for doing so. Fact: next to the stunt work that French superstar Jean-Paul Belmondo achieved in Peur Sur La Ville , McQueen was merely dipping his little toe into a very deep pool. Reality schmality!
The action sequences in Peur Sur La Ville are nothing short of jaw-dropping, even by the standards of movies today. One chase sequence in particular has Belmondo pursuing a suspect up an interior stairwell, out through a window, across a series of rooftops whilst hanging onto various fascias and bits of guttering before smashing through a skylight into a department store. Once on street level again, a car-chase ensues, climaxing with Belmondo running atop a moving train! Verneuil lets his audience know that it's his leading man putting his neck on the line as Belmondo ban be clearly seen, every step of the way. This is undoubtedly one of the best examples of its kind ever committed to celluloid.
Peur Sur La Ville would probably have never been conceived if it hadn't been for the aforementioned Bullitt or for that matter, William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971).For years, European critics sneered at American remakes/reworking of classic foreign language films and held theirs heads high with the view that continental cinema was not only innovative, but had set the trends for the Yanks to replicate. However, Bullitt, French Connection and Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971) set the record straight once and for all; the anti-hero cop was as American as the hamburger. These groundbreaking films introduced audiences to unorthodox cops that had a case to break, by any means necessary, even if that meant acting as ruthless as the criminals they were fighting to keep off the streets.
By the mid seventies, Italian directors such as Enzo G. Castellari with High Crime (1973), Franco Martinelli with Violent Rome/Roma Violenta (1975) Fernando De Leo with Calibre 9/Milano Calibro 9 (1974) and Umberto Lenzi with The Tough Ones/Italia a Mano Armata (1976) had all begun to dabble within this new found genre with the likes of Franco Nero, Tomas Milian, Maurizio Merli and Fabio Testi as the names on the marquees. Although immensely enjoyable, almost all of these Italian polizei (as they’re known in Italy) never rose above formulaic. However, Verneuil, a Turkish film-maker working in France, pulls off a real coup in Peur Sur La Ville by making his film a hybrid of both polizei and giallo and it works on every level.
The giallo is yet another pulpy Italian export. Giallo (or gialli, in its plural form), is the Italian word for yellow and it is this colour than adorned the covers of murder mysteries written by Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett. The word/colour stuck and it was this name that would later become synonymous with the work of filmmakers such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento, who directed Blood And Black Lace (1964) and The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1969), respectively.
A diabolical killer calling himself Minos is on the loose in Paris. Having lived through the “free love” of the sixties, and having not had any, he decides that he will “act as an arm of justice that will condemn without pity, and execute all those who wallow in the sexual mud that is drowning us” and sets about murdering promiscuous females. Hot on his heels is Latelier (Belmondo), Paris’ most unconventional and unruly detective, a man who gets sadistic pleasure out of seeing his suspects squirming, a creation not unlike Dirty Harry.
(Paul Alaoui)
