CRACK IN THE WORLD with a score by Johnny Douglas has an amazing Main Title cue. The rest of the score is solid but I found it more generic. It's a good score just not as great as I remembered it. The last time I saw the film I was a bit too young to realize how central the issue of sexuality is to the whole film. The whole conflict is that Dana Andrews has only "penetrated" so far and gotten stuck and hasn't made in any progress in months. No surprise it turns out that he can't and hasn't slept with his hot wife. So his desire to nuke the mantle is an attempt to either force the situation or some kind of metaphoric-unconscious rage. He has a rival who fights against the nuking just as he covets the wife. So the whole world's destruction is initiated by a love triangle between an older and younger guy over a woman. The film didn't really have the budget to crack the world wide open but they did what they could including showing a map with a jagged red line on it! Movies, gotta love 'em.

"The orchestrated music by Paul Ferris, who performed the same duties for The Sorcerers and later scored Monty Python and The Holy Grail, is richer and more agile than the exploitative subject-matter deserves, but matches the scope and majesty that an ambitious young director of Reeves's character no doubt wished for. In other words, this is one of the classic horror movie scores of the period, never once overreaching into melodrama or falling back into B-movie histrionics ... Note also that Paul Ferris apparently has a cameo in the picture as Paul Clark, the grieving husband of the accused and roasted sorceress, Elizabeth Clark." [Rod Williams]