Good & Bad, but music was awful!

Rating: 6/10 (9 August 2015)

In general I like movies from the 1950s and early 1960s, especially in B & W. Maybe I'm lazy, but they usually have a simple moral which is easy to understand and not hard to empathise with. This was no exception, even though it had periods when it was overly melodramatic and others when it was uninteresting - possibly, the book's written words held attention but didn't translate well to the screen.
The big thing that let the movie down was the background music by Elmer Bernstein. Did I say BACKGROUND? At times, you could hardly hear the dialogue and the music's mood didn't match the action, added to which, it was tuneless to the point of being awful. It's difficult to believe that it was by the same composer as The Magnificent Seven, just a couple of years earlier, which is a classic.