Fear Over the City is a wonderful museum artifact of a 70s detective flick: interesting, well preserved, and in mint condition. How 70s is this movie? There's a crowd outside the standard cinema where the bourgeois are all waiting in line to see soft porn. Besides that Jean-Paul Belmondo beat Tom Cruise to the punch by doing his own stunts, like running on top of a moving metro car and swinging from a helicopter over Paris... Sound familiar, Tom?

This movie is far from the best of Henri Verneuil, the pacing is somewhat off, and the script is a little thin and slow. Also the one liners are predictable. It was actually the dawn of Jean-Paul Belmondo's stint as an action movie star (he did 2 actions movies prior to this one, but this one was the biggest hit of the decade for him. Of the major stunts in the movie, the best known in the helicopter one, but really the more impressive is the pursuit on Paris' rooftops and the chase on the top of moving subway. 50 years later, it's not a bad watch, for a rainy Sunday afternoon, but really it's far from other collaborations between Belmondo and Verneuil like "The body of my enemy" (out the next year), or even "The Burglars" in 1971.

Undoubtedly the best movie of JP Belmondo. Have seen more than 20 times. Tireless