For some reason John Williams's scores for the Indiana Jones series never seem to attract as much attention as those for his other family movies over the years, despite featuring some of his best writing and one of his most classic themes. Silva Screen's idea of combining highlights from the three scores was therefore most welcome, an opportunity to showcase just how good these scores really are.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is the best film, and score, in the series; for one thing, it introduced the wonderful theme we all know and love. But there's plenty more to savour: "The Map Room: Dawn" is stunning and "The Basket Game" a delightful piece of intelligent comedy scoring. The selections chosen for this album are a little odd though - with so much great music on hand, we get both the long and short versions of the Raiders March and the full version of Marion's Theme. Since the long version of the Raiders March is essentially the same as the short version with Marion's Theme edited into the middle, those other tracks seem curiously redundant.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was the darkest film in the series, and the only one yet to have received an especially satisfying soundtrack release. The album was only released in Japan, and even then it leaves off a lot of very fine material. Given its rarity, it is therefore very disappointing that there are only three tracks from the score presented here, but on the other hand, what three tracks they are! "Nocturnal Activities" is truly wonderful, "The Mine Car Chase" as exciting as they come (and at times is startlingly similar to "The Conveyer Belt" in Attack of the Clones), and the end title cue features probably the best of the series' secondary themes, "Parade of the Slave Children" (one of my all-time favourite Williams themes, in fact). The least interesting of the scores is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, though it still features some excellent material, especially the extended "Indy's First Adventure" section and the comedic "No Ticket".

This album is perfectly good enough and achieves what it sets out to achieve, which is to give people who wouldn't usually buy film music albums but like the Indiana Jones music something to buy. I'm not sure why film music enthusiasts would buy it however, since it eschews the chance of giving us any unreleased music (but does find time to include two versions of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes") and frankly you could make the CD yourself by compiling the original scores you almost certainly already have - thus escaping the disc's other problem, which is the slightly off-kilter performance by the usually-excellent City of Prague Philharmonic.

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