Decades before Tom Cruise was making audiences gasp, the Gallic star was getting up to even more hair-raising exploits on screen – sometimes with few safety measures.

One of modern Hollywood's great leading men, Tom Cruise, is to receive a fellowship from the British Film Institute this May, alongside a season celebrating his career. Cruise is described by the institution as a "daredevil action star", and someone with a "dedication to reinventing the cinema spectacle" – traits exemplified most of all by his role in the Mission: Impossible series, the latest of which, Christopher McQuarrie's Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, is out this month. However, while it's difficult to think a star of similar stature who performs such awe-inspiring stunts today, Cruise has a forebear who is just as daring, if not more so. That star is Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Belmondo, or Bébel as he is sometimes known, is familiar to many as a figure of 1960s French New Wave cinema. Though beginning his career in the early 1950s with work at Paris's Théâtre de l'Atelier, he soon began acting in films. Nouvelle Vague classics such as Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou (1966), Une Femme est une Femme (1961) and Breathless (1960) showed Belmondo working with ease in arthouse cinema, reflecting his intellectual background: his father was a sculptor and his mother an artist. However, Belmondo had an incredibly wide range.

In the same period as he was acting in Godard's avant-garde films, Belmondo worked on many different kinds of film, from French noirs such as Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos (1962) and Claude Sautet's Classe tous risques (1960), to straight dramas such as Melville's Léon Morin, Priest (1961) and, most importantly, Un Singe en Hiver (1962) by Henri Verneuil. As the years went by, it would be Verneuil who would shape Belmondo's later career thanks to his underrated thriller Peur sur la ville (1975). The film turned the actor into a proto-Cruise figure whose physical prowess and fearless stunt work would ultimately define him for French audiences.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and known in English-language territories as both Fear Over the City and The Night Caller, Verneuil's film is relatively simple in terms of narrative. Belmondo plays Letellier, a Parisian police commissaire who, much like Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971), doesn't play by the rules. He's haunted by a fatal incident in which criminal Marcucci (Giovanni Cianfriglia) managed to escape after a bank heist. However, Letellier and his sidekick Moissac (Charles Denner) are faced with another problem: a serial killer stalking and murdering women across Paris. It doesn't take long for the two cases to become intertwined as Letellier relentlessly pursues both villains across the city, with much derring-do and many gobsmacking stunts along the way.

Peur sur la ville was not well-received by the critics at the time, who were unhappy with Verneuil following American trends in depicting cops as cowboy-ish gunslingers breaking the rules to clean up cities. "Through some odd work with the trans-Atlantic scissors," wrote Richard Eder of The New York Times, "the Franco-Italian production Night Caller by Henri Verneuil seems to be two completely different movies, neither of them up to much." Eder did say that Belmondo's stunts were entertaining, though; generally, this was the only aspect that was reviewed positively. Equally, French film criticism pulled no punches. Film magazine Positif suggested that the film "evoked the worst of American police films", in particular in its "total absence of social background". What it did have in abundance, however, was Belmondo acting as if he had a death wish. And audiences loved it.

His shift from arthouse darling to action star was considered unusual at the time by some – though it wasn't quite as stark as it appeared. "When I was young, I did stunts for my own pleasure," Belmondo once admitted. "When I was at the conservatoire, I hung from the balconies. I always had a taste for stunts." Professor Lucy Bolton, a senior lecturer in film studies at Queen Mary University of London, says Belmondo's desire for physical roles made sense, given his background. "He was very physical, very sporty, and had a short career as an amateur boxer," she tells the BBC. "Apparently, he stopped because he didn't like his face getting so rearranged!"

Muriel Zagha, critic and co-host........

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