As you may remember, Mike Grost and I recently exchanged some friendly comments after my review of Step by Step, the 1946 film starring Lawrence Tierney and Anne Jeffreys. The director, Phil Rosen, began in the day of the silent movies and was close to the end of his career when he made Step by Step. The screenwriter for the film was noted mystery writer Stuart Palmer, author of the Miss Withers detective novels.

   Mike has a long page of commentary about Stuart Palmer and his work at his own Classic Mystery and Detection website. If you’re a fan of Palmer’s, I invite you to go and read it first, and even if you’re not.

   A recent addition to that page is a lengthy discussion of Step by Step, which Mike has agreed to allow me to reprint here. In his comments Mike not only compares Palmer’s writing techniques in the two media, print vs. film, but he also takes a look at Phil Rosen’s traits as a director, comparing some aspects of Step by Step with The Young Rajah, a silent film he made in 1922.

— Steve



Step by Step


   Palmer’s last Hollywood film Step by Step (1946), is an entertaining comedy espionage-thriller. Palmer scripted, from George Callahan’s story. The tale has some elements in common with Palmer’s prose mysteries:

   * The hero, an ex-Marine played by hulking Lawrence Tierney, bears some resemblance to Miss Withers — in personality, that is. (Miss Withers is frequently compared to horses, while he-man Tierney looks more like a gorilla.) Like Withers, the hero is a snoopy, comic, highly persistent amateur detective, who stumbles over suspicious circumstances, and butts in to investigate where he is not wanted.

   * He has a comic but intelligent and helpful dog to whom he talks — Hildegarde will soon acquire her poodle Talleyrand in Four Lost Ladies (1949).

   * The code is hidden in an unusual hiding place (inside the jacket). Palmer had written several mysteries about hard-to-find hidden objects: “The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl”, “Once Upon a Crime” and “Rift in the Loot.” Those prose short stories were puzzle plots, in which the reader had no idea where the object was till the solution of the story. In Step by Step, however, the viewer learns right away where the code manuscript is.

   * The bad guys do lots of impersonation, reminding us that Miss Withers liked to impersonate people, and so do some of the villains in her stories, notably in “Rift in the Loot” (1955). Impersonation of sorts also turns up in some of Palmer’s Strange Person plots.

   * The way that the senator, his secretary and chauffeur are all echoed and impersonated by spies who are a fake senator, secretary and chauffeur, perhaps recalls the symmetry that plays a role in some of Palmer’s stories.

   * Some of Palmer’s mystery puzzle plots revolve around men who wear each other’s clothes: The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), “The Riddle of the Double Negative” (1947) and “Once Upon a Crime” (1950). In Step by Step, the hero wears the murder victim’s jacket. This plays a role in the thriller plot — but it is not the subject of a puzzle plot mystery, unlike Palmer’s prose fiction. The heroine also tries on the hero’s Marine uniform.

   * A hammer keeps playing a role in the story, popping up again and again with new and different connections to events. This is a bit like the Palmer characters who are Mysteriously Involved, and who keep getting tied in to the mystery plot in new ways.

   * The blinking light in the finale recalls the moving beams of light in Arrest Bulldog Drummond. Palmer perhaps thought that “telling a story with light” was a good approach to the film medium. Such use of light is also found in director Edgar G. Ulmer’s films.

   One wonders if “B-13,” part of the spy code, is Palmer’s homage to John Dickson Carr’s radio play, “Cabin B-13” (1943).

   The other members of the creative team also have personal elements in Step by Step. George Callahan’s use of electronic bugs by the spies recalls the even more unusual television jukebox in The Shanghai Cobra, for which he also wrote the story.

   Director Phil Rosen was reduced in 1946 to low budget B-movies like Step by Step, but during the silent era he had worked on major films like The Young Rajah (1922).

   * Rosen has Tierney doing much of his early sleuthing clad only in bathing trunks, in scenes that recall Rudolph Valentino in a swim suit rowing for Harvard in The Young Rajah (Rudy wins the Big Race).

   * Rosen doesn’t have a budget for the sort of opulent costumes seen in The Young Rajah, but he does have a large cast of men in every sort of unusual clothes: in addition to his shirtless hero, there is a doctor in whites, a true and false chauffeur, both in uniform, and more leather clad cops than you can shake a stick at. The cops have two different kinds of motorcycle uniforms. Such elaborate uniforms were also a tradition in Columbia Pictures B-Movies, such as the Boston Blackie films of the 1940’s.

   * The retired Vermont sea captain in Step by Step might reflect the fondness Rosen showed for New Englanders in The Young Rajah.