Jerry Goldsmith's scored a few obscure films in his time, and here is a couple more.  Ransom was a 1975 British/Norwegian co-production starring Sean Connery as a Norwegian security officer (!) and Ian McShane as a terrorist who hijacks an aeroplane (!!) - it didn't exactly set the world alight but it garnered respectable enough reviews.  While these days he's thought of primarily for his scores for action thrillers, 30 years ago that wasn't really the case for Goldsmith, so one can only imagine the thrill that came when a score like Ransom first came out.  A thrill-ride from start to finish, it's no exaggeration to describe it as one of his best entries in the genre, with the tense style he favoured in movies like Twilight's Last Gleaming and Capricorn One being given a sexy twist.

The score opens with the excellent main theme heard for the first time in "Queen's Messenger", a wonderfully edgy piece that can certainly stand alongside the more celebrated equivalents in the two scores mentioned above.  The standout cue is undoubtedly "Sky Chaser", a six-minute tour-de-force in which a great big romantic theme heard alternately in a strings arrangement and a horn-and-piano one vies for attention with an especially terse version of the main theme on trombones and some really punchy, taut suspense material.  It's got to count among the most exhilarating pieces of Goldsmith's career.

Since Ransom is so short (only about 25 minutes), Silva Screen wisely decided to complement it with another somewhat obscure Goldsmith score, this time from J. Lee Thompson's The Chairman, another espionage thriller, this time from 1969 and starring Gregory Peck, who goes to China.  This gave Goldsmith his third opportunity (after The Spiral Road and the epic masterpiece The Sand Pebbles) to go to the far east, musically, and he certainly didn't disappoint.  His opening title theme is actually rather similar to The Sand Pebbles, perhaps crossed with a little Tora! Tora! Tora! (which was composed a little later), though without the portentous opening of either.

In general the score alternates between vaguely exotic presentations of the main theme, some beautiful romantic material (the Eastern-flavoured "Goodbye for Now", for example, and especially the main love theme, given its fullest presentation in "The World Only Lovers See", with the delicate piano solo performed by none other than Goldsmith himself) and finally some great action material, again of the hard-edged variety heard in Ransom, though this time a little subtler and now so flowingly melodic.

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