Bernie's music

Herrman's main theme is definitely distinctive -- an ominously and inexorably pounding, advancing march, punctuated by stridently blaring clarions.

The scoring, and the dead-on casting and performances of Aldo Ray as the near-psychotic Sergeant Croft and Raymond Massey as the fussily egotistical General Cummings, are really the only things to recommend this filmed version of Norman Mailer's book, one of the "great American novels" to come out of World War II.

Mailer himself, after viewing the film, remembered it as "the worst movie I'd ever seen."

Herrman's music as alway is a cut above. I hear Vertigo and Day the Earth Stood Still in it.

With your eyes closed and your back to the screen,you know Herrman's music.
It has the blaring brass of trombones or french horns...the earth shaking tubas as in the day the earth stood still...the deep foreboding bass clarinets. It also has the operatic release as in the love scenes from vertigo -- his tristen and isolda.
The theme march in the naked and the dead is a hymn to the obscenity of war...brutal, unrelenting. Sometimes his stuff sounds like Aram Katchaturian for its bombast. Then the jungle scenes are a staple of Herrman's with low woodwinds and lots of decending tones.
I think the naked and the dead is at least half, maybe a little more even, a good movie. Raoul Walsh was a swashbuckling, hard driving, one-eyed director who directed a lot of the best Bogart, Cagney and Flynn movies at Warners. If the whole production had been mounted by a studio that wasn't going under as RKO was, the picture might have finished stronger.

He reused his music several times. The opening music and much of the film's is right out of Jason and the Argonauts - except the title music is a faster tempo. Nothing wrong with it, after all it's his score.