It Happened in Broad Daylight

It Happened in Broad Daylight (1958) is a Swiss-German thriller you can watch online on iFILM. A little girl is found murdered beside a forest road, and a detective on the edge of retirement swears to her mother that he will find the man responsible.

Suspicion lands fast on Jacquier, a peddler — even though he was the one who led police to the body. Commissioner Matthäi doesn't buy it and breaks with everyone around him: the case is closed, yet he keeps pulling the thread alone. He works out that the killer hunts little girls in red dresses and lures them with sweets, then commits to something unthinkable — using a child as bait. Heinz Rühmann plays the investigator whose promise curdles into obsession, while Gert Fröbe — five years before he was Goldfinger — builds a mild-looking man who freezes your blood.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote the screenplay and later reworked it into the novel The Pledge, which Sean Penn would film half a century on. A cold, meticulously plotted procedural about a man who sacrifices himself for a stranger's child. Stream It Happened in Broad Daylight (1958) online on iFILM.