Take One False Step

William Powell is in town raising money for a new college. He runs into Shelley Winters, one of his girlfriends during the War. She invites him to a party, but finds it pretty sparse. Winters comes on to him, hinting at an unhappy marriage. Powell rejects her, since his marriage is happy. The next morning, Miss Winters is reported as missing. Powell goes to her house to recover a scarf he left. He is bitten by a dog. Evidence points at Miss Winters being in San Francisco. Powell goes, soon to be pursued by cops James Gleason and Sheldon Leonard. Also, the dog is reported as rabid.

This movie plays like a mash-up of THE 39 STEPS and D.O.A., with director Chester Erskine larding on the dark atmosphere increasingly as the movie progresses. Unfortunately, there is no humor in the script, nor any clear reason why Powell would not go to the police at any point. The result is a slow movie that does no one's career any good.

William Powell is always worth watching. The rest of TAKE ONE FALSE STEP is rather harder to appreciate, because logic is not its strongest suit. Freddie, the top villain, never shows his mug - makes no difference to the story, anyway.

Shelley Winters is clearly wasted in her role as potential femme fatale who seems ready to go with any man, Powell most of all, and turns out to be more suicidal than fatal. Other than her apparently nymphomaniacal tendencies, I still have no idea what crime she may have committed.

Direction and cinematography are OK, script has more holes than the proverbial Swiss cheese. Generally immediately forgettable - and yet, TAKE ONE FALSE STEP has its moments, especially when Prof Gentling (Powell) learns that he has been bitten by a possibly rabid dog.

I could not grasp why Prof Gentling kept deflecting comely, ready for action Winters' advances... his wife is played by the stunningly beautiful Dorothy Hart!

Have always enjoyed William Powell but only have caught Ms. Winters in a couple of movies when she was a scarlet. She has a confident air about her that carried on even in her later career. William excretes refined class that marks all his acting career and this is no exception. This role did not show him as the professional slueth that make no mistakes, heck, I don't think he even won a fight, but that makes the movie believable. He is a professor doing his best gumshoeing when the chips are down. The movie builds a few characters up that really lead to nowhere, not sure why, like they were filling the time slot to finish the movie and it drags in places.

I could watch Powell sleep and not be bored, but Ms. Winters shined in her parts and sorta overshadowed Powell in their scenes. The movie was pretty straight forward plot wise and could of used a few more twists because the main twist really wasn't unexpected.

Not a waste of your time to watch, but also not one William's stronger roles. Rating 6.5 just on the performances of the two leads.

Take One False Step takes too many of them. The jokey titles, of the coy sort that director Charles Erskine whisked into The Egg and I two years earlier, do not bode well; but they prove to be merely the first of the movie's faux pas. All the way through, the slovenly narrative and grating shifts of tone subvert what might have been a halfway decent suspense story.

Distinguished professor William Powell travels to Los Angeles to secure funding for a new college. The false step he takes is into a cocktail lounge, where he meets up with an old wartime flame, now unhappily married (Shelley Winters). They order martinis for old time's sake, a single for him, a double for her. But either the bartender or Erskine isn't paying close attention, because when the drinks arrive, in close-up, they're exactly the same size.

Later, in her cups, Winters causes a scene clinging to Powell, so he deserts her. Next morning, he reads the headlines that she's missing, presumed murdered, and that he's the prime suspect. And here the plot melts down into a hopeless muddle. Powell, with the help of Marsha Hunt (whose place in the mess goes unexplained) tries to solve Winters' disappearance. He finds that the boyfriend she kept on the side was involved, along with her husband, in some shady `syndicate' business which Erskine keeps so deep in the background that it's just a red herring. In the course of his snooping, Powell gets bitten by a dog that may be rabid and, the clock now ticking, heads to San Francisco for the final unraveling.

Along the way, Erskine jumbles together sequences which look and play like noir with others that are the worst kind of late-40s cutsey (absent-minded professors, a dithery doctor). And a good cast gets brusque treatment. The debonair but slightly raffish charm that made Powell such a hit in the Thin Man series looks a little shopworn (though the role of the lurching, drunken vixen works for Winters, a notoriously imprecise actress, and suits this very imprecise vehicle). James Gleason and Sheldon Leonard prove reliable as the pair of cops on Powell's tail, but they're still doing shtik. At the end, the coy comedy of the titles returns to trump the suspense. Take One False Step teems with gaffes and implausibilities; nobody even bothered to decide what kind of movie it was supposed to be. Small wonder it ended up being a lousy one.

In order to finance his new college, Professor Andrew Gentling (William Powell) and a pair of colleagues travel to Los Angeles to secure funding from curmudgeonly tycoon (Paul Harvey). Things go awry after Powell runs into his now married, former girlfriend (Shelly Winters) at his hotel bar. Powell, now happily married himself, reluctantly accepts an offer to go with Winters to a small get-together that evening to meet another old friend (Marsha Hunt). After dropping Winters off in front of her house later that night, Powell learns from a newspaper article the next morning that Winters has been reported missing and that foul play is suspected. Rather than reporting what he knows about the incident to the police, Powell, fearing losing financing for his new university from stuff-shirt benefactor Harvey, (who as a plot convenience hates any hint of scandal), decides to play detective and solve the disappearance himself.

'False Step' is part Hitchcock suspense thriller, part old school detective, a smattering of Powell's witty 'Thin Man' and topped off with a few dashes of 1930's screwball comedy. The casting and characters are also an unusual lot from Shelly Winters as the dapper Powell's floozy ex-girlfriend to James Gleason and Sheldon Leonard as a couple of wise cracking Runyonesque type cops. The results, like the styles, are mixed. The movie never really gets into a flow. Like a screwdriver in the bicycle spokes, what could have worked as a suspense mystery is thrown off the tracks by invasive injections of unneeded comedic relief. The script itself, in addition to lacking a cohesive direction, is just generally confusing as to the suspects' relationships and motivations. As such the urbane Powell is largely wasted as he steps through the disjointed scenes in a workman-like manner.

'Take One False Step' does have it's moments mainly due to Powell and cast mates who manage to pull it across the finish line. All-in-all it's a competent but forgettable film.