Es geschah am hellichten Tag (English: It Happened in Broad Daylight) is a 1958 German-language thriller film directed by Ladislao Vajda.

The original screenplay was written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, a Swiss playwright and novelist, and the first incarnation of the film is still acclaimed by critics.

Matthäi, a senior detective with the Zürich police, is about to take up a post in the Middle East when a call comes in that a peddler has found the body of a little girl in the woods.

He rents a filling station on the road, where he takes the numbers of cars from Chur, traces their owners, and under various pretexts rings up to find out if they have children.

Driving from Chur to Zürich in his large black car, a businessman named Schrott sees Annemarie playing and stops at the filling station, though his tank is nearly full.

When Annemarie is late back from school one day, Matthäi sees chocolate stains on her hands and finds hedgehog truffles in her pocket.

Das Versprechen differs from Es geschah am hellichten Tag by having the detective fail to identify the killer in the end because of the murderer's death in a car accident.

American director Sean Penn made a fifth movie on the same theme, named The Pledge in 2001, starring Jack Nicholson and Helen Mirren.