Simenon himself had planned to direct La tête d’un homme, but the producers enlisted Julien Duvivier, who had a number of literary adaptations to his credit. “One of the first great screen incarnations of Georges Simenon’s famous sleuth, Inspector Maigret. Only months after Jean Renoir filmed La nuit du carrefour with his actor brother Pierre, Duvivier passed the pipe to Harry Baur, and the results were just as broodingly electric. Maigret roams crowded Montparnasse cafés and dingy tenements as he plays cat and mouse with a nihilistic, Dostoevskian killer. Both a classic film noir and a seminal police procedural” (Lenny Borger).