Buy it... if you appreciate Jerry Goldsmith music at its most exuberant and boisterously enthusiastic, in this case comedic due to its airy atmosphere and light waltz rhythms.

Avoid it... if you find Goldsmith's breezy, overly-positive comedy music to be remotely trite, because The Great Train Robbery reminds significantly of the composer's campy fluff from the 1960's.

Goldsmith

The Great Train Robbery: (Jerry Goldsmith) In a diversion from his usual preoccupation with the concepts of science fiction and fantasy, writer and director Michael Crichton visited the genre of vintage crime caper with 1979's The Great Train Robbery. Crichton had published the film's story in a 1975 novel, exploring a devious plot about the efforts of two master criminals (and their beautiful accomplice, of course) to steal gold from the British government in a clever new way in 1855. Eying some gold transported by train for the first time in history, a man of high class and his keymaster associate devise a way to obtain the four keys necessary to open a safe on that moving train and steal riches headed to British troops fighting a distant war. Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland are the naughty protagonists, using any nefarious means by which to obtain wax imprints of the necessary keys, eventually culminating in high thrills aboard the train itself at the end. The atmosphere of The Great Train Robbery is relatively low-tech on screen and off (the film was made for only $6 million), but it utilized an abundance of charm to retain audience interest. A strong crew (assembled mostly in England) included veteran composer Jerry Goldsmith, a friend of Crichton and collaborator on many of the director's projects. While Goldsmith's spirited music for The Great Train Robbery maintains a healthy following, it could be argued that his general endeavors for Crichton-associated films didn't really impress until the 1990's. It's hard to deny that 1979 was a year great achievement for Goldsmith, though, and while The Great Train Robbery admirably serves its purpose, it doesn't compete on any level with his concurrent work for Alien or Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Goldsmith's music for comedies often straddles a fine line between infectious enthusiasm and obnoxious fluff, and The Great Train Robbery unfortunately strays a bit too far to the latter side. It is easily one of the composer's most optimistic and light-hearted efforts for a full ensemble, joining in the romp of the story's twists with unquestionably affable characteristics. The instrumentation is geared towards a light atmosphere, with plucked bass strings often dancing underneath high woodwinds, xylophone, violins, and occasional harpsichord. Whether you, as a Goldsmith collector, can find enough merit to appreciate in these airy tones apart from their necessary application in the film is another matter.

Goldsmith uses the meter of a waltz in the polar opposite fashion as he had the previous year in The Boys from Brazil, this time taking the period-appropriate rhythms and accelerating them under an exuberant major-key theme. This idea receives boisterous, full-ensemble treatment in the opening and closing title cues, informing the remainder of the score with almost perpetual development of either the progression or its underlying rhythm. A three-note motif that opens the rhythmic figures beneath the thematic performances is a good tool with which to provide a quick moment of suspense while characters are sneaking about on screen. Goldsmith doesn't take much time to explore much supplemental material in The Great Train Robbery, instead content to allow his primary idea to effortlessly carry the likable story through its delightful twists. Not only is there a relative absence of significant depth to both the composition and the performance (there are occasionally moments when Goldsmith stacks lines in the complex fashion you hear in many of his other scores, but such complications go against the spirit of the score), it's a rather short work overall, Goldsmith's contribution substantially limited to the major expositions of the title theme in the final cut of the film. One employment of this idea does stand out in the score; in the short "Departure," he increases the pace and corresponding level of excitement in the ensemble as the steam locomotive gets its start; it's not a terribly original idea, but an effective one nonetheless. On the whole, The Great Train Robbery is as engaging as it is trite, accomplishing all of its goals but potentially opening the doors for a headache in listeners who can't tolerate hopelessly optimistic comedy for long periods. The meat of the score was only available on a rare 1990 dual CD (with Goldsmith's The Wild Rovers) for many years. In 2004, Varèse Sarabande remixed more of the music from newly discovered 24-track masters, allowing for not only superb sound quality when heard on regular CD players, but also an SACD presentation for those equipped. In 2011, Intrada Records issued a definite, 2-CD set of the complete score, adding mostly source-like material for solo flute and guitar but also a few new suspense cues in the middle passages. That set also includes extensive alternate takes, fifteen minutes of the actual source pieces, and the original LP presentation on the second CD. Neither the 2004 nor 2011 albums were limited in quantity. The sound quality on either of the later albums is indeed very impressive, but it only magnifies the difficultly that some listeners might have with the extremely positive tone of the score. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.26 (in 113 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.32 (in 133,462 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.