Remarkably, despite already being one of the most prolific, well-respected and critically-acknowledged film composers around, Jerry Goldsmith claims that he just didn't get offered films to score in the early 1970s, meaning he had to find work in television instead.  This led to a whole series of scores for tv series and (a new form) tv movies.  Three of those tv movies are presented here on this album, part of Film Score Monthly's Silver Age Classics series.

Whether they would count as "classics" were they by anyone else, I'm not so sure.  The album opens with Hawkins on Murder, a long-forgotten pilot for a series starring an ageing Jimmy Stewart as a homicide detective.  Goldsmith's sprightly theme seems slightly out-of-place, but that makes it no less entertaining.  It's very different from the music heard around it however, which is mostly dissonant material, far more what you might expect for such a show but far less entertaining away from it.  It's performed largely by a small orchestra with prominent parts for experimental synthesisers, and the occasional guitar.  Aside from the infectious main theme, it's difficult to like.

The second score is Winter Kill, made a year later in 1974.  It starred Andy Griffith and was about a serial killer on the loose.  I'm loathe to just copy and paste my comments about Hawkins on Murder and apply them to this other score, but I wouldn't need to change much.  Again, there's a wonderful main theme that seems to be rather out of place (it sounds like a western) and, again, the rest is dissonant and very difficult to come to terms with.  Indeed, the dissonance is even more pronounced, with Goldsmith going all out with the synthesised effects and often eschewing the (small) orchestra altogether.  It's probably one of Goldsmith's most experimental efforts, belonging a place alongside the highly-impressive but totally-unlistenable Reincarnation of Peter Proud.

Finally, the album's most notable entry comes with Babe, Goldsmith's Emmy-winning 1975 score for the biopic of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the legendary female athlete.  It's an entirely different effort from the other two scores presented here.  The main theme is one of Goldsmith's bucolic slices of low-key Americana and is simply irresistible.  For guitar and strings, it's an especially beautiful and attractive piece, similar in emotional impact (if not style) to his theme from Rudy two decades later.  Unfortunately, beautiful though it is, the score is completely monothematic and even at just 27 minutes seems to drag a little.

FSM's packaging is as good as always, with informative liner notes by Jon Burlingame, and the sound is fine.  Unfortunately, I find it rather harder to recommend this album than any of their other Goldsmith releases.  There are three excellent main themes (Babe in particular) but the rest isn't entirely satisfactory when heard out of the context of the tv movies.