Simply Perfect

Simply A Masterpiece

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

"Take One False Step" is a very weak William Powell film. Despite being a fine actor with a long string of excellent films behind him, this one from late in his career is among his worst. As a mystery- suspense film it just doesn't pay off, due to a particularly weak script.Andrew (William Powell) is a professor in town to start a new college. However, when he arrives there, an old flame, Catherine (Shelley Winters) sees him and is very insistent that they spend the evening together. She's a bit of a mess and why the professor agrees is a bit inexplicable. They go out for a drive and she is a bit drunk...and their evening is anything but fun for him. After dropping her off, he soon learns that she's disappeared and folks think foul play. Here is where the picture gets rather dumb. Instead of going to the police or just sitting tight, Martha (Marsha Hunt) convinces him that he needs to investigate the disappearance himself, otherwise he might be accused. Does a college professor investigating make much sense? No. But it makes even less when everything he then does makes him look guilty as sin! And, for a smart guy, he sure seems like a big dummy!The problem is the script. Andrew's actions rarely make sense and the picture just isn't very satisfying as a result. I think it's best a film for die-hard Powell fans...otherwise, you can skip this one.FYI--Marsha Hunt is still going strong at 99 (she turns 100 in October).

Preparing to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco to give a lecture on the opening of a new college, distinguished William Powell runs into an old acquaintance (Shelley Winters) who takes him for the ride of his life as he becomes a suspect in her sudden disappearance. It is instantly clear that there is more to this than meets the F-B-I, and his efforts to clear himself and make it to his lecture. Everything than can go wrong does go wrong, especially a fight with a vicious German Shepherd whom Powell believes may be infected with rabies. His efforts to get treatment do not go without comical effect as the doctor he goes to for quick treatment moves at a snails pace, then he gets caught in a traffic jam as all of the cars ahead of him are searched for a rabies infected man.While this film noir with comic overtones ends up being mediocre as far as structuring and the sometimes absurd screenplay, it is never without tension. Veteran actor James Gleason is a smarter-than-average detective, while the gorgeous Marsha Hunt as Winter's acquaintance who helps Powell out and Dorothy Hart as Powell's wife offer fine support. But watching the former Nick Charles even innocently being on the opposite side of the law is an enjoyable experience, his easy-going personality still prominent 15 years after being served his first shaken martini. Second-billed Winters, far thinner than her later character years, shows the blowsiness here in her young years that made her a fan favorite years later.

After many years of exclusivity at MGM William Powell was starting to do outside projects like this one, Take One False Step. He's teamed with a most improbable partner, maybe the most improbable he had since Bette Davis, this being Shelley Winters.I think that's at first glance. I'm not sure today's audiences might have appreciated this fact, but Powell and Winters are introduced to us people who may have had a wartime fling. In those days of separation and Powell is mentioned as being a scientist and in the army. That could have spelled isolation and you took your needs where you found them. That would be true for women as well. So this unlikely pair of lovers might have been an item circa 1941 to 1945.But this is 1949 and Powell is in Los Angeles from New York with a pair of fellow academicians, Art Baker and Felix Bressart, who are pitching a Philistine like millionaire played by Paul Harvey for a big check to endow a new university they want to found. In the middle of this campaign, Powell hears from Winters. When Powell meets Winters we can see that they really are from two different worlds, but a post World War II audience would have appreciated it.Shelley has got herself a nice little drinking habit and Powell after a bit of coaxing goes on a midnight drive with her where she wanders off in a state of inebriation. The next day Powell finds out through her friend that she's missing and presumed dead and the LAPD is looking for a distinguished male friend she was with that night.Powell instead of turning himself in, starts his own investigation and gets himself in deeper. Turns out Shelley's husband Jess Barker is a low level syndicate runner whose responsible for a large amount of betting money that's also missing. Just what has Bill stepped into?It would have been smarter all around had Powell just gone to the cops in the first place, but detectives James Gleason and Sheldon Leonard who you might think are Keystone like Kops and do have some funny lines really do have a handle on the thing all the time as you'll see if you watch the film.Powell and Winters are completely lacking in chemistry, but that's part of the key to both their characters, two people who except for being thrown together during the war would never in a million years have hooked up. Even after the plot is resolved, there's still a surprise waiting for Bill Powell. Take One False Step will never be among the top 10 of the films for either of the stars, still it has quite a bit going for it just in the contrast of the 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.