Watch It Happened in Broad Daylight For Free

The greatest movie ever made..!

Powerful

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

"Es geschah am hellichten Tag" or "It Happened in Broad Daylight" is a German 95-minute black-and-white film from the late 1950s, so this one will have its 60th anniversary soon. It was directed by Ladislao Aajda, who also adapted Friedrich Dürrenmatt's novel (with Dürrenmatt himself) for the screen. Today, this one is seen as one of Germany's finest films, especially in terms of crime drama. Heinz Rühmann is almost in every scene from start to finish and he was nominated for a German Film Award for his portrayal here. Same goes for Gert Froebe, who has considerably less screen-time though and does pretty much not appear at all in the first half of the film. This one is really all about the main character's (a police detective's) relationship with his employer and also about a man who was arrested despite being innocent.For Froebe, his villain role here, may have been one of the main reasons who he got cast in his career-defining role as Auric Goldfinger, so even if he lost the German Film Award (just like Rühmann), it was a very important film for him. Rühmann, in his mid 50s here, was mostly known in German for the comedy films he made earlier in his career that made him a big star, but here he shows us that he also definitely has the talent for darker, more gritty films. It was quite fun to watch him with the serious material in here. Overall, this was a quite good watch in terms of story, performances and atmosphere. I think you may want to check this one out. Thumbs up for "Es geschah am hellichten Tag" and I see the film was popular enough that they made a sequel several decades later shortly after Rühmann's death, with Joachim Król playing the main character, but I have not seen that one. And there are more sequels from outside Germany. But this one here is the original. Go see it.

An ititerant peddler (Michel Simon) finds the body of a young girl in a Swiss forest and alerts an inspector from a neighboring town who'd once been kind to him. When Inspector Matthai (Heinz Ruhmann) gets there, he finds a mob eager to lynch the peddler who soon commits suicide in his cell after a grueling interrogation. Matthai believes the old man was innocent and the savage razor slaying the work of a serial killer prowling the woods along a major highway. No longer on the police force, the ex-inspector sets out to catch the killer by renting a roadside gas station and hiring a young woman with an 8 year-old daughter to be his housekeeper with the intention of using the child as bait... That's a dangerous game to play in this gripping cat-and-mouse thriller that's also a fairly good police procedural, considering the resources and lack of forensics at the time. Gert Frobe is chilling as the misogynist psychopath and it was this performance that led the producers of GOLDFINGER to cast him as the titular megalomaniac.

'Es Geschah...' has one really big problem, in my opinion: the lead character, policeman (or, at that that time, former policeman) Matthäi takes too big risks with the little child. Up until then, he has been a brilliant and feeling (police)man, and to let the child wander off alone on several occasions - making her a sitting duck for a perverted killer - is completely out of character. Beyond that, this was a fast paced, at times very atmospheric crime thriller concerning a daring subject for its time. The use of a psychiatrist looks to be something that may have inspired Hitchcock for 'Psycho', but I'm only guessing there. The opening with the peddler makes a clear statement, reminiscent (well, the other way around, really) of 'Jagten' (2012). The use of children's drawings and fantasy is, it's been said before, a terrific idea. And finally, the creating of a bad guy like Schrott, with his all that puppet play and such, as performed by Fröbe, is eerie as you'll not much see it.Still, I can't go any higher than a big 5 out of 10, on account of the lack of credibility beyond a certain point... such a shame.

Its one of the movies where black&white perfectly fits. Its potential is very impressive; watching Gert Froebe arguing with his wife is high class cinema. This movie is a recommendation for Froebe playing psychotic bad guys in the first place. Although the movie focuses on Detective Matthai (Ruehmann) its Gert Froebe's physical presence and his face impressions that are really admirable.I think the end of this movie will reveal lots of questions. What happens to the murder after he got caught? Will he be transported to jail or a lunatic asylum? Will the Detective marry the lady? Will the little girl get psychological treatment? I admire this dark psycho thriller. I also would like to know what happens after the murder has been caught.I would recommend this movie to watch in darkness without any lights on. Because of the black&white screen, and the music watching this movie gets very intense!