Ladislao Vajda’s Es geschah am hellichten Tag (US: It Happened In Broad Daylight) is a perfectly symmetrical bookend to German film noir: both Vajda’s 1958 film and Fritz Lang’s German expressionist, proto-noir masterpiece M (1931) more than a quarter-century earlier center on the hunt for a serial murderer of little girls. The children-in-peril premise, which also brings to mind Carlos Hugo Christensen’s If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952), is outrageous, yet executed totally believably: police lieutenant Matthäi (Heinz Rühmann) doubts the culpability of the local peddler Jacquier (Michel Simon) in the murder of a little girl in the woods; instead, he believes the crime is connected to two similar child killings in the region, so he rents a gas station on the only mountain highway that connects all the murder locations. Once established in the village, he employs a local single mother (Maria Rosa Salgado) as live-in housekeeper, accompanied by her young daughter who’s been shunned by the local children and resembles the latest victim. Matthai uses the little girl as bait, the purity of her playfulness beside a brook a glowing beacon for pedophiles. Bruno Canfora’s score opens and closes the film with orchestral melodies groaning alongside the endless trunks of towering forest trees.