The Night Caller

The Night Caller (Peur sur la ville, 1975) — watch online on iFILM — is a French crime thriller directed by Henri Verneuil, with Jean-Paul Belmondo as the relentless Commissaire Letellier. Paris is gripped by fear: a killer who calls himself Minos phones young women at night, delivers a moral verdict, and murders those who don't comply.

Letellier is not exactly a textbook detective — he's rough-edged, in trouble with his own superiors, and hunts by instinct more than procedure. Charles Denner plays Minos as a voice and a shadow for much of the film, which keeps the dread at a slow burn. Then there are the stunts. Belmondo did them himself: the helicopter sequence over the Paris rooftops is real, unassisted danger, and it registers as such on screen — no digital smoothing, just a man and a drop.

Verneuil built one of the cleaner examples of seventies French action cinema here — fast, hard, and shot in a city that no longer looks like this. Stream The Night Caller (1975) online on iFILM.