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38th Review for The Collab Weekly Movie Watch

A film that never quite manages to be as cool as its title, but is nevertheless one of the most interesting and often suspenseful detective thrillers that hasn't gotten the respect it deserves.

In many ways, its premise constantly reminded me of the classic M, albeit less sinister. Indeed, our assassin felt wretched, less of a menacing entity and more of a pathetic one, attributable in large part to the excellent performance of Goldfinger himself. Ruhmann as Inspector Matthias is terrific, holding your interest with his persistence and ion with solving this crime even if it means seeing his entire career and personal life fall apart.

Vajda does an outstanding job of…

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English Version below ...

Es geschah am hellichten Tag (1958)
It Happened in Broad Daylight

Machen Sie sich bereit für eine höchst ungewöhnliche und beunruhigende Spannungsgeschichte!

Es geschah am hellichten Tag ist ein Spielfilm von 1958 mit Heinz Rühmann und Gert Fröbe in den Hauptrollen. Er wurde als Koproduktion von Schweizer, deutschen und spanischen Filmproduktionsgesellschaften realisiert. Regie führte Ladislao Vajda, der das Drehbuch gemeinsam mit Hans Jacoby und Friedrich Dürrenmatt nach dessen Idee geschrieben hatte.

Im Schweizer Kanton Graubünden wird in der Nähe einer Waldstrasse ein ermordetes Mädchen aufgefunden. Auf seinem einsamen Weg durch den Wald stolperte der Hausierer Jacquier über die Leiche des kleinen Mädchens. Obwohl er selbst die Polizei alarmiert, glaubt ihm niemand, dass er mit der schrecklichen…

10

Writing about this movie is strangely difficult, in part because its competence is so quiet and matter of fact that it defies easy description. Usually, when movies are this inch-perfect, there are scenes, or twists, or emotional beats around which reviews can be built, and to which it's easy to point as evidence of near-greatness. With It Happened in Broad Daylight, though, there's a sort of matter-of-fact competence that's so all-encoming it's often hard to see clearly enough to discuss.

At its most basic level, the film is a thriller — a long, serious SVU episode about the serial targeting and murder of young girls. Beneath the straightforward horror of the story and the quest to find the killer, however,…

Review by Ziglet_mir ★★½

Viewed with the Amazing Edith's *Collab Film Group*. 

I get Night of the Hunter vibes except with way less villain time, though the sequences that carry Mr. Schott certainly have their weight to them and this makes the climactic moments punch with a fierce jab (unfortunately no haymaker). The intro camera work glides along a forest floor, looking upward toward the trees, wandering still... to be interpreted later as the perspective of a child walking alone in the woods. I can it It Happened in Broad Daylight has fantastic 20 minute bookends, only to be slogged down by a mediocre middle. For a German caper about a child's death, this is decent. Wish there was more character development for the inspector to make it a better time with his character.

5

A rogue cop places a child in mortal danger, lies to her mother about his intentions to use her, takes away the family’s agency, makes the kid play exclusively near the highway for days on end, and generally acts like a pedo himself in his efforts to catch a killer of little girls. But then that makes it all sound way more salacious than it actually is, its darkness is mostly buried in a methodical discreet procedural.

By any modern assessment senior detective Matthäi is a capable, driven, but horrible person. He radiates professionalism yet is so subtly arrogant that he's willing to endanger others. He's sure that no harm can come to them while under his watchful eye. But…

2

Winterzeit ist Klassikerzeit die Erste (1)

Seiner Zeit voraus würde es treffend beschreiben.

Nahe, aber nie zu nahe inszeniert Ladislao Vajda diesen Klassiker nach einer Vorlage von Friedrich Dürrenmatt der hier in gemeinsamer Arbeit das Drehbuch beisteuerte.

Heinz Rühmann spielt locker von der Hand weg.

Siegfried Lowitz wird vom Sympathieträger zum Arschloch.

Gert Fröbe der erst ab Minute fünfundsechzig auftaucht, gibt seiner Rolle genügend Fleisch um ihm den Kindermörder abzukaufen.

Michel Simon brilliert und stellt locker die Schauspielerriege in den Schatten.

Kurze Anmerkung: wie subtil und doch so offensichtlich die sonst mit brachialer Gewalt herandonnernde Musik (ein keiner Minuspunkt) bei Gert Fröbes Erscheinen auf der Bildfläche wechselt zu einem lockerflockigen, leicht von Sinnlichkeit sprühenden Musikstück als er mittels des Rückspiegels die spielende Annemarie sieht, ist so einfach wie mit dem Vorschlaghammer daherkommend.

PS.: Wie zuckersüß sind den die Kinderdarsteller.

10

1st Ladislao Vajda

WARNING: Spoilers for both It Happened in Broad Daylight and The Pledge all the way through this review.

I’d like to talk about, appropriate considering my choice for the week of famous authors operating in the filmic sphere, It Happened in Broad Daylight’s relationship to the novella that grew out of it, The Pledge. Dürrenmatt was, at that point, one of Switzerland’s most prominent intellectuals, having written two of his most enduring texts earlier in the decade, “The Tunnel”, an darkly absurd story about the obsession with order, and “The Visit”, a bleak tragicomedy about group thought. How he got to write a murder mystery for the cinema I don’t know, but the result was one that…

8

Zum erstenmal finden auf dem DuBFal- Server, die DuBFaL-Must-see-Weeks statt. Film Nr.: 6

Es geschah am hellichten Tag
(Bis zum 07.03.2023 in der ARTE-Mediathek abrufbar.)

Det Ort Mägendorf in Zürich/Schweiz
Hier wird, in der nähe im Wald, eine Kinderleiche gefunden. Matthäi von der Zürcher Kantonspolizei übernimmt den Fall, der doch komplizierter ist als am Anfang gedacht.

Krimidrama von 1958 aus Deutschland, der Schweiz und Spanien, der auf einen Roman beruht. Hier sehen wir Heinz Rühmann mal in einer ernsten Rolle, was auch gut zu ihm t. Siegfried Lowitz und Gert Fröbe haben hier auch Rollen.
Der Names des Filmes hab ich schon öffters gehört, auch das man sich ihn ansehen sollte. Also ein perfekter Kandidat für die "Must-see-Weeks". Hab auch…

Review by Tom ★★★½

Such a simple plot, yet so interesting.
It happened in Broad Daylight is about a fairly typical detective story and child murder case.
But somehow it stands out, it's not a masterpiece or anything, but it stays in your head. The 100 minutes fly by so fast and especially the character depth made the film stand out. So many questionable things and moral problems arise that really interest you and make you think about why things happen.

The film is really good and I had fun watching it. With my Dad who watched it years ago and we randomly saw it on Tv and ate great food while watching it.

6

28th movie watched with the Collab Film Club

I can’t in good conscience give a ing score to any mystery thriller that relies this heavily on the characters, with very little information in front of them, making wild pseudo-psychoanalytical assumptions that they couldn’t reasonably make given what they know about the crimes they’re investigating, assumptions that inexplicably end up being dead-on accurate. I know pre-1970s movies in this vein were still making the mistake of attempting to provide clear cut, understandable motivations for psychopathic behavior, something we’ve all come to realize as folly, and are thus prone to aging very poorly, but this one is particularly egregious [spoiler ahead, so stop reading now if you plan on watching this yourself]…

Review by teamgal ★★★★

Re-made as THE PLEDGE in 2001, this German/Swiss/Spanish co-production from the late 50s is a surprisingly contemporary story of a police investigator's dangerous obsession with a serial killer of children, and the ways in which it unravels his own sense of decency, knowingly placing a little girl in harm's way in an attempt to trap the murderer. Not without its flaws — the soundtrack, for example, seems to have been grafted onto this from another, lighter picture — but the fact this mad procedural could be seriously mentioned alongside something like M is compliment enough.

2

The works of writer and playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt were often offbeat, to say the least, as the way he combated the relieved uneasiness of the world after the Second World War was through satiric tragicomedies that filtered the world through an absurdly comic vision as his protagonists often tried desperately to escape from the tragic fates they themselves put their lives into. Dürrenmatt's films often toyed around with and criticized popular genres at the time, such as the wide scope of detective novels coming out, and when tapped to write a screenplay Dürrenmatt did just that, with a little help from Hans Jacoby
and Ladislao Vajda to help make it more resemble a screenplay rather than a novel. The author's…