LAST TIME I covered The Man from U.N.C.L.E., my 117th Goldsmith work and some of the coolest spy music ever.
THIS TIME I’m covering another FSM release of Jerry’s music: the label’s combo album of three unrelated TV movies he scored in the mid-1970s. Hawkins on Murder and Winter Kill were filmed as prospective pilots, with the former eventually continuing as a series of Jimmy Stewart TV movies in 1973-74 with music by other composers. Babe was a standalone movie co-starring a Hall of Fame football player who only a year before had (yes, really!) immortalized Mongo in Blazing Saddles.
Hawkins on Murder (1973)
The bouncy main theme, with its booming dramatic percussion hits, is a delight, though it could have done without the insistent beat from the Moog synthesizer. Along with the almost-spectral sounds scattered throughout the program, those electronics haven’t aged terribly well.
It’s a short score, but it has some distinctive charm, and the melancholy theme for the accused gets one truly knockout statement. If we’re comparing it against Goldsmith’s other 70s crime TV work, it arrives somewhere between the quality of the Barnaby Jones and Archer pilots.
Rating: ***
Winter Kill (1974)
It’s a work of two personalities. You have a catchy pseudo-Western main theme in the same vein as his primary ideas for Take A Hard Ride and Breakheart Pass, albeit with half the performance being taken up by an ARP synthesizer this time. Fun and with just the right amount of cheese.
You also have the suspense material. Some of it works well enough as a standalone listen; the snarling dissonance for the reveal of the killer foreshadows some of the harsh musical violence Goldsmith would expand on in the mid/late 70s and 80s. But a lot of it consists of tabla hits and synth sustains, and after a while it feels like a chore. FSM wisely moved some of it out of the main program and into the album’s bonus section.
Rating: ***
Babe (1975)
No, not Goldsmith’s rejected music for 1995’s pig comedy. We’re talking about Goldsmith’s music for a TV movie about perhaps the greatest all-around female athlete of the 20th century.
If you have any affinity for Goldsmith’s understated, almost chamber-like dramatic works dominated by a single theme (like A Girl Named Sooner and The Homecoming) or the man’s writing for solo guitar, you’ll probably like this too. The few moments where the rhythm section gets busier suggest the halfway point between Goldsmith's “going to town” music in The Red Pony and his 80s/90s “suburbia” style. We even get a minute near the end where the main theme gets slowed down and played on solo piano, somewhat like how Michael Giacchino writes when trying to play up (down?) sadness.
It doesn’t hit the highs of his other 70s Emmy winners (The Red Pony and QB VII). But that’ll do, Jerry. That’ll do.
Rating: ***1/2
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Up next in the Goldsmith Collection Expansion Chronicles: more television!
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