"It happened in broad daylight" is about a killer with pedophilic tendencies. A very sensitive subject.
The screenplay for this film was written by Friedrich Durrenmatt, who later elaborated on this script to write the novel "Das Versprechen" in the same year (most of the time the order is the other way round). On the basis of this novel Sean Penn made the remake "The pledge" (2001).
The film can be divided into two parts.
In part 1 there is an innocent suspect who commits suicide during the investigation
In part 2 a police commissioner, the only one who doesn't believe that the former suspect was quilty, tries to find the real murderer.
Part 1 reminds of "Fury" (1936, Fritz Lang), part 2 of "M" (1931, Fritz Lang). I suspect that the fact that both films are from Fritz Lang is not a coincidence.
The film has a cast of a very high quality.
The French actor Michel Simon, known from among other films "L'Atalante" (1934, Jean Vigo), plays the innocent suspect.
Heinz Ruhmann, by far the most popular actor in Germany those days, plays inspector Matthai.
Gert Fröbe plays the real murderer. He was so convincing that in 1964 he was casted as villain in the Bond movie "Goldfinger" (Guy Hamilton).
One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the motive of inspector Matthai to start his private investagation in the second half of the movie. There are three possibilities.
The rational one given in the film that as long as the real murderer has not been found there are children in danger.
Feelings of guilt towards the innocent suspect from the first half of the movie.
The pledge given to the mother of the murdered child that the real murderer would be found.
Given the title of the novel my choice is the third possibility.
"It happened in broad daylight" is a tense movie, proving that good movies were made in Germany between the expressionism of the '20s and the "Neue Deutsche Welle" of the '70s.
Both with respect to strong and weak elements of the film there is a relation with Alfred Hitchcock.
Strong is the way in which the film uses the technique of revealing the real murderer to the spectators at an early stage, but hiding this information from the other main characters.
Weak is the excessive reliance on (Freudian) psychology. In the film a psychologists makes a rather accurate perpetrator profile from the drawing of a child only. In "Spellbound" (1945, Alfred Hitchcock) we saw a similar overestimation of psychology.
