The New Pictures

Take One False Step (Universal-International) features William Powell climbing in & out of a highly unlikely scrape. As a distinguished educator in search of a university endowment, Powell appears hardly bright enough to run a class in finger-painting. Though happily married, he accepts a date with a blonde barfly

(Shelley Winters) who was his girl friend in the happy-go-lucky war days. Next morning when Miss Winters is found to have disappeared, leaving behind a bloodied scarf belonging to Powell, he takes his next false step. Instead of reporting to the police, he sets out to run down the murderers and is presently up to his ears in big-time racketeers, a ferocious police dog, and a presumptive case of rabies.

Given the sturdy talents of the two principals, there was a chance in this one for some bright comic touches. Unfortunately, Irwin Shaw, who wrote the screenplay, and Director Chester Erskine, who stumbled about in surplus dialogue and plot, failed to exploit the story's skimpy elements of suspense. Take One False Step sets out to be a sprightly whodunit. After the first reel, it turns into a sad case of who cares.

The Fountainhead (Warner), as titles go, is a stunning understatement. Based on the bestselling novel by Ayn Rand, who also wrote the screenplay, it is actually a geyser of emotional sounds and ideologically, signifying only that Author Rand--and possibly Hollywood--are uneasy about the state of the world.

As Novelist Rand sees it, the creative individual (Gary Cooper as a daring young architect) is threatened with extinction by the collective herd (Raymond Massey and Robert Douglas as the publisher and architecture critic of a powerful New York newspaper). Though photographed as if it were a titanic struggle between conflicting principles, what follows turns out to be a tussle between neurotic pinheads. At one point. Cooper dynamites several blocks worth of a housing project to assert his artistic integrity. Blowing hot & cold on Cooper's ambitions, Massey finally puts a bullet through his own head after commissioning Cooper to build the tallest skyscraper in Manhattan.

Like a runaway Wagnerian opera, Fountainhead lumbers from crisis to crisis in a hysterical crescendo of muddleheaded talk and stagy pretentiousness. Its final, most brassy explosion: an enormous, foreshortened view of Gary Cooper--presumably a hulking symbol of rugged individualism --straddling the topmost scaffolding of his new skyscraper. Apparently aimed at Communist and other critics of the American way, Fountainhead will provide some of the corniest grist for Soviet propaganda mills that Hollywood has produced in a long time.

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