Ça s'est passé en plein jour

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.

This Swiss movie, originally made for TV, was dismissed by Durrenmatt because he felt it didn't probe deeply enough into the driven character of the Inspector. I totally disagree with him. This version is powerfully realized and stunningly acted. Durrenmatt's literary version, The Pledge, undercuts the power of the theme and registers the Inspector's commitment as hollow and pointless. The American movie version of the Pledge was a conceptual, execution and box-office disaster.

What Durrenmatt does in The Pledge is to book-end this satisfying story with a narrative overlay that only revokes all the drama and suspense of the central story. This is as pointless and destructive as book-end CASABLANCA with a narrator that claims that Rick was really a scoundrel working for the Nazis the whole time.

Once I met an arabian, and while talking about cinema, he said, for knowing this movie he would forget five of his lovely movies, after watching it ! G. Fröbe and H. Rühmann are playing such fabulous, that you think somebody inconvenient is entering your near forest. Everybody I know is worn down after this Horror-criminal, where NO violence or anything bizarre is shown! Turn off the lights.

One of the best movies of the 1950ies.

Truly one of the superlative thriller/mystery films of all time. I saw it in the original German on Austria TV and it is still gripping. I thought it is so Hitchcockian then I realized the musical technique--the sudden loud shrieks in the orchestra--at the moment of contact with the killer, his house and the car. This is Psycho. The film mood and pace is Psycho. Then again, I realized the film and the Broadway play which received Tony nomination were both celebrated shortly before Psycho was made. Could it be that Hitch made the perfect horror film as a paean to this great masterpiece. One of the few films of the genre I will set next to Hitchcock and it does indeed hold its place superbly. Can any compliment be higher. If you love Hitchcock as I do, you must get the film--the original German print of 1958 not the TV version and not the American remake with Nicholson, as fine as it is. If you understand German watch it first that way. Unforgettable.

The story of the perverted child murderer SCHROTT (Fröbe) and his hunter MATTHAEI (Rühmann) is still thrilling and frightening. The present events ensure that the story remains current. Fröbe and Rühmann can show their acting skills (what they were not always allowed to do).

To keep it short:

Ingenious actors in a great film, which is based on a great book, that was written by an ingenious author.

I'm waiting for the Hollywood-remake.