Peddler Jacquier finds the corpse of a little girl in the forest, runs to the village pub and phones Lieutenant Matthai from Zürich police to report it. The police arrive at the crime scene, but find no clues except that the girl was killed by a razor blade, so they blame Jacquier who commits suicide. Matthai was supposed to fly to Amman to train the police, but changes his mind and is convinced the real murderer is still out there. Matthai takes the little girl's drawing which depicts her next to a tall man in black. Based on other two murders of little girls along a road from Zürich to Chur, Matthai rents a gas station, hires Miss Heller as a maid and uses her little girl Annemarie as bait. Realizing a businessman, Mr. Schrott, is seeing Annemarie in the forest, Matthai confronts him. Mr. Schrott attacks him with a razor blade, but the police shoot him.
As much as Penn and Nicholson delivered a remarkable effort in their crime film "The Pledge", their remake could not reach the genuine simplicity of brilliance of the excellent original "It Happened in Broad Daylight", one of the best Swiss films. Based on a script by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (who was not satisfied that his meditative ending was changed into a happy one in the film, so he wrote a novel "The Promise"), "It Happened in Broad Daylight" plays with the people's deepest fears, in this case with an unknown misogynist criminal who kills little girls due to his private frustrations, but a one who leaves no trail, yet insuppressible police Lieutenant Matthai (comedian Heinz Ruhmann in a remarkably serious edition) will not give up until he captures him, even if he has to use unconventional methods via a little girl as a "bait". The opening act sets up an incredibly tight mood thanks to sharp writing that creates strong characters and dialogue, relaying on sophistication, not on violence or banal thrills.
Little details and clever ideas go a long way in this film. When a mob wants to lynch Jacquier, the man who found the corpse of the little girl, but is now suspected of being the murderer himself in the pub, Matthai realizes his small police escort is heavily outnumbered, so he untypically addresses them: "If you can give me one evidence he is guilty, I will hand him over to you." One man says he saw Jacquier walking in the valley, but since three other men from the crowd admit they were also in the valley but said man didn't see them, Matthai ironically comments that he would now have to execute all five of them. While investigating, Matthai stumbles upon a drawing of the murdered girl in the elementary school which depicts her with a tall man giving her a hedgehog, while a car and a goat are also depicted. Upon sitting next to a man in a plane, eating chocolate truffle, Matthai relizes the "hedgehog" was actually said dessert, and that the goat is an insignia of canton Graubünden on the car plates, so he rents a gas station along the road where the murders happened and writes down every car plate with a goat insignia. He also builds a playground right next to the road so that the girl Annemarie can become a bait, in a risky move. The attempts at psychological explanation of the murderer's motives feel weaker, though, and the ending with the large doll is not that well thought out, which comes off as illogical. Nontheless, the movie is crafted with such an elegant and natural craftmanship by director Ladislao Vajda that it seems universal and fresh even today.
Grade:+++
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