Es geschah am hellichten Tag (It Happened in Broad Daylight) (1958), directed by Ladislao Vajda. Monday, March 13, Blu-ray from Europe at movie night.

A long time ago, I found one of those 500 Movies to Watch Before You Die-type books at an estate sale, this particular one being assembled by Time Out in London, or some other UK publisher. Sometimes these books have interesting essays, though usually not. Not due to any great accomplishment on my part, I have never encountered one where I hadn’t at least heard of the movie (there were many I hadn’t seen).

Until this one. Buried deep in the middle of this list was the weird Swiss/German production of It Happened in Broad Daylight, from 1958. The story of a detective chasing down a child killer sounded much like Fritz Lang’s M, and, since I hadn’t heard of it, made me want to watch it badly.

Unfortunately, at the time, it wasn’t available, even on a European DVD. But then I found the novel on which it was based: The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Only it turns out that this is not the novel on which the film was based–Dürrenmatt wrote the script then was baffled and angry that the second half compromised his original. Later, earlier this century, Sean Penn made a movie called The Pledge, with Jack Nicholson, that is supposedly true to the original story. But Sean Penn’s movies often get praise and are abysmal, so I don’t know if I’ll see that.

The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel is insane and one of my favorite noir novels. The story is the same in the book: a wandering peddler finds the mutilated body of a dead girl in the woods. A detective, Matthäi, is about to retire to Jordan for the warmer weather and to work part-time in a city there. He’s only slightly involved in this murder, because he’s literally leaving the next day.

The peddler is captured and almost lynched. Under great duress, he confesses. However, Matthäi not only learns that there have been two other similar murders in differing parts of the country (which the peddler couldn’t have done), he also has a strong sense against this culprit as the murderer. But the peddler, now distraught, hangs himself, and the town and the police believe the case is closed.

Matthäi can’t deal with this. He had to break the news of the girl’s death to her parents, and the mother of the child made him swear to catch the man. Whenever Matthäi sees children en route to the airport, he gets a pang of regret and guilt. Abruptly, he turns around, determined to re-open the case and solve the crime, as he has in the past.

Problem is, the cops in his town don’t want him anymore. The case is closed! His notions are ridiculous. Matthäi has pieced together a lot of little clues from a drawing the victim made just before her death, and he’s obsessed by it. He has determined that the killer is likely someone who travels a highway and is centrally located. Taking his savings, and now removed from official police work, he buys a gas station in a rural area, and waits.

What’s that going to do, you might ask? This is where it gets morally complicated, and where the novel jumps into high gear: Matthäi, a retired detective, essentially stalks a single mother whose child resembles the three prior victims. He knows the mother is destitute and lonely, and asks her–and her child–to move into the gas station. He builds a playground for the child… in broad view of the road. She’s the bait for this serial killer.

This is an incredible plot, a great McGuffin with a complex moral center. In the book, Matthäi’s obsession is both noble and repellant. As one might guess, he’s beginning to become attracted to the woman and to love the child. But he presses on.

And, of course, he’s successful. Here’s where the plots diverge (spoiler alerts: are you really going to read the out-of-print book or watch the never-really-on-DVD film?): in the film, we cheer on Matthäi, he doesn’t really have that much of an emotional connection with the woman, and cares for the child in a distant way, and, when the time comes, he nabs the criminal with a fake child waiting in the spot. It’s a good scene, but too heroic.

The book, though, holy crap, it’s bleak in that existential European way I just love. Matthäi has the girl play in the spot where he knows “the Magician” (the killer’s nickname) was coming to claim her, and gets his police friends to wait, which they do. But they’re horrified, unable to really believe what he’s done. Worse–the killer never arrives, and Matthäi is devastated. The mother has found out, and naturally abandons him, his reputation is ruined, and he’s driven to madness.

The problem? The Magician, it turns out, was killed in a car accident on the way to the rendezvous.

It Happened in Broad Daylight, like its clumsy title, is a pretty great movie at the start that falls prey to what I’m guessing is a star and production team too skittish to commit to the bleak, bleak plot Dürrenmatt had conjured up. It would take all those years later for a filmmaker, albeit Sean Penn, to stick with it. If you can find the book, grab it and read it.