"The City of Paris" is credited as one of the stars of this bizarrely menacing little film. Indeed, its bustling streets, cobblestoned courtyards and tiled rooftops become the locus for a (Cheshire) cat-and-mouse game between Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret and his prey. "I wonder what kind of animal we've caught," Maigret muses aloud-but about which animal? If Burgess Meredith's little knife sharpener, henpecked into an act of desperation, is mousey indeed, Franchot Tone's Nietzschian manipulator is another kind of varmint, with a penchant for hanging his grand philosophies off the Eiffel Tower and an unfortunate tendency to overact miserably. (His own mother spits on the ground he walks on; everyone's a critic.) Director Meredith re-creates a Paris straight out of Les Miserables for actor Meredith's pathetic street vendor, then updates it with neorealist street scenes, a Wellesian tracking camera, and a trio of amoral American expatriates (a man, his wife, and his mistress, arm in arm); in this universe everyone has something to gain by murder, and a nearsighted little man is lost indeed. Enter Inspector Maigret-sly, a bit shy, always courteous and bitterly moral as portrayed by Laughton-to torment his victim as he saves him from larger predators.