Save your money for something good and enjoyable

One of my all time favorites.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Even though World War II had ended the previous years and the Axis regimes we fought were also ended, Nazis were still serviceable villains. Step By Step has some Nazis right here in the good old USA regrouping for another chance.But they have to get a list from US Senator Harry Harvey first. He's been doing some investigating and he has a list. You'd think he'd know it by heart, but I digress.Anyway recently discharged former Marine Lawrence Tierney meets Harvey's secretary Anne Jeffreys out on the beach for a swim and later when he inquires, he's told there's no such a person. That starts the whole rigmarole and we discover fifth columnists still doing their nasty wartime stuff.Step By Step should have been left behind for war surplus as the market was glutted with these kinds of films 41 to 45. There are far worse, but a lot better that have stood the test of time. Right at the beginning Harvey says that we've been fighting these people since Bismarck. Really a US Senator ought to know his history better.

Lawrence Tierney didn't often get to play good guys, and--judging by his performance in this compact, tight little actioner--he's actually pretty good at it. Tierney plays an ex-Marine who inadvertently gets mixed up with a pretty blonde (Anne Jeffreys, looking fetching), German spies and a murdered secret agent. There's more comedy than you usually see in a Tierney picture but there's also the kind of shootouts and fisticuffs you expect in a Tierney picture, and director Phil Rosen expertly blends them all together; in fact, this is probably the best of Rosen's pictures that I've seem (he could usually be found grinding out cheap Bowery Boys programmers for Monogram and shoddy jungle pictures, and worse, for PRC). There's a good supporting cast--John Hamilton, George Cleveland, James Flavin--it's well acted, moves like lightning and everything gets wrapped in just about an hour. Location shooting along the California coast helps greatly. A fun picture, definitely worth an hour of your time.

Step By Step plays like a feature version of an old time serial. Jam-packed with fist fights, auto chases, Nazi spies (still causing trouble in the pre-Cold War year of 1946), comedy, a little romance, and lots more, Step By Step also features an attractive lead couple in Lawrence Tierney and Anne Jeffreys. Director Phil Rosen's bread and butter was short and sweet Poverty Row programmers, and this is one of his best. Great fun on a low, low budget.

A senator, his secretary, a German spy ring, an ex-marine and his feisty little mutt, and an amiable codger converge to give us this peppy spy-comedy. This was before the spy spoof (James Bond, Austin Powers) which feature absurd, cartoonish heroes battling impossible threats. The STEP BY STEP genre, though its plausibility is still suspect, is more realistic in its characters and especially its threats, such as German spies. There actually WERE German spies.Lawrence Tierney and Anne Jeffreys manage to meet and immediately get mixed up in the murder of a "government operative" who has come to give vital information to the senator Jeffreys works for. It doesn't matter that we're never told the nature of the information the spies are after; the movie is too short and the plot too simple for that. It's strictly a FOR FUN picture, with Lawrence Tierney less of a tough guy and more comical than usual. I mean, here's a guy who locks himself out of his woody, then later, accompanied by a bow-tie wearing cop (it was the Forties, just accept it), enters the senator's presence wearing nothing but swimming trunks!The dog, Bazooka, has some pretty good moments. He's one of those 40's canine actors who are possessed of irritatingly and at the same time charmingly unrealistic smarts - such as instantly recognizing the hammer the spies throw at him as an instrument by which his master can break into the locked car.John Hamilton plays the Captain, proprietor of the motel where Tierney and Jeffreys hide out. Funny when the loveable codger asks the couple for his radio amplifier tube back so he can listen to Dick Tracy.STEP BY STEP succeeds as a FUN picture, but I can't help wondering how these quickies were originally presented. Double features? Because if I'd been part of the moviegoing public in 1946, I'd have wanted at least another short one to go along with SBS.