Take One False Step

An honest everyman in town for a conference meets a woman who traps him in a criminal conflict. It’s a quintessential noir story deftly brought to life in Chester Erskine’s intricately plotted Take One False Step, starring an appropriately vulnerable William Powell (in his final film role) and a wonderfully annoying Shelley Winters. Married college professor and aptly named Andrew Gentling (Powell), visiting Los Angeles to raise funds for a new school, bumps into old flame Catherine Sykes (Winters), who is unhappily married and still attracted to Gentling; after spending some time reminiscing, Gentling drops the drunken Catherine at home, but she refuses to exit the car, so he leaves her there and walks home. The next morning, she’s gone missing, so Gentling commences a search for her before he’s connected to her disappearance by not only police captain Gledhill (James Gleason) but also her gangster husband (Jess Barker) and his thugs. Perhaps marred by a couple of leaps of logic, the plot is dense, but thoroughly entertaining, winding through private diaries, breaking and entering, manhunts, police roadblocks, extramarital affairs, rabid dogs, car accidents, and suicide attempts. Infused with Powell’s reputation for comedy (he starred in the Thin Man movies after all), the film sometimes hints at screwball, the wisecracking dialogue and comic timing merging satisfyingly with the desperation and violence of noir. Planer’s cinematography uses plenty of shadows, most notably whenever the mysterious character of Freddie Blair (Mikel Conrad) is on screen, and otherwise relies on dark atmosphere to fuel suspense (note the extended sequence in Catherine’s apartment when the trespassing Gentling is forced to contend with the sudden arrivals of a German Shepherd, police detectives, and Catherine’s lover in succession.)