Excellent, a Must See

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

It seems this is not a place to watch movies. No use to me.

I became curious about this one after realizing that this was a film based on the same source material as a later adaptation directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson, Robin Wright, Benicio del Toro and Aaron Eckhart.Penn's version is a very bleak, disturbing film with Jack Nicholson actually disappearing into the role of the main detective character, something he so rarely does these days. The unrelenting gloom of the film was probably what made it less palpable for audiences at the time of its release. I have to wonder if that atmosphere of despair was taken from the book, or simply inserted by Penn in his adaptation of the screenplay.This version from the late 50's is nonetheless a very effective thriller in its own way, with great performances and very well directed. Gert Frobe (Goldfinger) gives a very chilling portrait of the killer, while Heinz Ruhmann as Detective Matthai is excellent too, and carries the film well.It's simply one of those solid and well-done black and white thrillers from an earlier era that slips under the wire, and that should be rediscovered again by contemporary audiences. Criterion! Check this one out!

Its one of the movies where black&white perfectly fits. Its potential is very impressive; watching Gert Froebe arguing with his wife is high class cinema. This movie is a recommendation for Froebe playing psychotic bad guys in the first place. Although the movie focuses on Detective Matthai (Ruehmann) its Gert Froebe's physical presence and his face impressions that are really admirable.I think the end of this movie will reveal lots of questions. What happens to the murder after he got caught? Will he be transported to jail or a lunatic asylum? Will the Detective marry the lady? Will the little girl get psychological treatment? I admire this dark psycho thriller. I also would like to know what happens after the murder has been caught.I would recommend this movie to watch in darkness without any lights on. Because of the black&white screen, and the music watching this movie gets very intense!

This Swiss movie, originally made for TV, was dismissed by Durrenmatt because he felt it didn't probe deeply enough into the driven character of the Inspector.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.