The New Pictures

Something to Live For (Paramount) casts Ray Milland as a reformed alcoholic who might be having a hangover from his Lost Weekend. An advertising man who has not touched liquor in 14 months, Milland is toying with the idea of just one nip. A duty call from an organization something like Alcoholics Anonymous sends him to the aid of promising Actress Joan Fontaine, who has taken to the bottle because she is afraid of facing a Broadway opening night. Milland's interest in her progresses, of course, from the clinical to the romantic. But since he is happily married to Teresa Wright and has two children, nothing much happens, and the actress and the adman finally go their separate ways, both of them stronger for having known each other.

On sober analysis, Dwight Taylor's screenplay, with its rich lather of plot manipulation and sentimentality, verges on soap opera. But George (A Place in the Sun) Stevens' direction is clean and uncluttered. Stevens has a camera magic that evokes a world of romantic illusion: the frustrated lovers caught up in a slow mire of overlapping dissolves, of magnificent closeups, of telephones ringing unanswered, of rainswept city streets.

Ray Milland, looking distinguished and slightly seedy, moves through his role with the appropriate air of a sleepwalker in a bad dream.

Retreat, Hell! (U.S. Pictures; Warner), inspired by the Korean war, was also inspired by countless Hollywood war movies of the past.

Set off against some forceful battle sequences that make use of authentic stock war footage is a cast of not-so-authentic stock characters. Among them: a hardboiled, softhearted colonel (Frank Lovejoy);* a boy who becomes a man under fire (Rusty Tamblyn); a retread captain (Richard Carlson); and, for laughs, a Southern marine who wisecracks during the Korean action: "This is one war that makes sense--North against the South!"

Director Joseph Lewis has deployed his cast efficiently in documenting the progress of a battalion from training at Camp Pendleton to the Inchon landing, the recapture of Seoul and the 1950 drive into North Korea when the marines, battling frostbite and the enemy, had to fall back to Hungnam harbor. But Director Lewis' leathernecks, marching from the halls of Hollywood to the shores of sentiment, are screen stencils rather than flesh & blood marines, and the result is formula heroics.

* Lovejoy delivers the historic rejoinder of Major General Oliver P. Smith, then commander of the 1st Marine Division in Korea, who, when asked if his troops were retreating, said: "Retreat, hell! We're not retreating, we're just advancing in a different direction." (A variation on the fighting words of Marine Captain Lloyd W. Williams, who, when ordered to retreat at Belleau Wood in World War I, replied: "Retreat, hell! We just got here.") Passed by a special ruling of Hollywood's censors, the forbidden screen word "hell" has already met with censorship troubles elsewhere. When a San Antonio radio station objected to the word in a commercial, the picture was referred to on the air as Retreat, Heck!

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