Oscar Levant’s much-repeated crack about knowing Doris Day before she was a virgin has grown stale. But it had bite four decades ago, when a new generation was discovering its sexuality and Ms. Day was shielding her middle-age chastity with the tenacity of the Viet Minh in Hanoi. In truth, the only thing virginal about her was her insuperable blond and beaming independence, fortified by confidence, notwithstanding the occasional “Ooooh, he makes me so mad” episode. In a blond and beaming era, she went her own way, never parodying sexuality, a la Marilyn, or bottling it up the better to smolder, a la Princess Grace. Yet she ended happily in bed more than either of them, always on her own terms, over the course of which she survived more than three dozen leading men, most of whom faded while she marched cheerfully on.

Ms. Day had been around. She was the coolest and sexiest female singer of slow ballads in film history; the only female band singer to achieve movie-musical superstardom; and the only major star of movie musicals, female or otherwise, to survive their passing and win even greater popularity in comedies. She had toured as a dancer by 12, signed as a band singer by 16 (a car accident had forced her to change priorities), married and had a son by 18, and had the no. 1 record in the country by 20 – “Sentimental Journey,” with Les Brown and His Band of Renown, in 1944. Maybe she looked like the girl next door, but her voice, with its impeccable intonation and uncanny lilt (taking her time, she turned vowels into sighs), promised sultry nights in the Casbah. Seek out her Christmas CD and see what she does with “Winter Wonderland.” Or stick with the movies and notice how she halts that misguided epic, “Jumbo,” to emote a full-bore “My Romance” – candid and alluring, with never a trace of sentimentality.

Michael Curtiz attempted to interview her while she wept copiously over an impending divorce (no. 2) in 1948, and he not only gave her the lead in his cruise-ship farce, “Romance on the High Seas” (introducing “It’s Magic,” her first solo no. 1 hit under her own name), but signed her to a personal contract. He must have been elated. The Hungarian-born director, best known for reinventing the swashbuckler in the sound era while establishing the career of Errol Flynn (Warner’s recent “Errol Flynn Signature Collection” has the best of them, “Captain Blood” and “The Sea Hawk”), and for the definitive wartime melodrama, “Casablanca,” adored American showbiz. He directed more backstage musicals than anyone else, with the possible exception of David Butler, including the genre’s all-time masterpiece, “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” With Ms. Day he glanced at nightclub singing in her debut, the trials of radio in “My Dream Is Yours,” and passed her off to Butler for the Hollywood spoof, “It’s Great Feeling.”

The eight-film “Doris Day Collection” begins with her fourth film, Curtiz’s stylish jazz melodrama “Young Man With a Horn” (1950).Though long ridiculed for its obsession with high notes and for betraying the theme of racial identity that animates Dorothy Baker’s admirable novel, the film has aged well, thanks in part to the brilliant location photography by Ted McCord, Curtiz’s preferred cameraman from then on. One of Curtiz’s most decisively composed movies, it is nonetheless paced with his trademark speed.

In the novel, the white orphan Rick Martin discovers who he is through a deep friendship with a black drummer, Smoke (at one point, he calls him “honey”), whose sister, Josephine, is a Florence Mills-type singer; in the movie Smoke and Jo are played by Hoagy Carmichael and Doris Day. The screenplay opts for a more conventional relationship between white boy and black mentor, but in so doing creates a powerful moral figure in the expanded character of Art Hazzard, played with urgent finesse by Juano Hernandez. This overwhelms the good girl/bad girl quandary represented by Ms. Day and Lauren Bacall, who enters the film in a mirror.

Kirk Douglas is convincing, Ms. Bacall is scary, and Ms. Day looks worried but sings like a lark. The end is sappy – the film has earned something better – and Harry James’s often schmaltzy trumpeting for Mr. Douglas undermines the argument of good versus commercial music. But listen to the playing of Art Hazzard, as dubbed by Jimmy Zito, a studio musician who had worked with Ms. Day in the Les Brown band and later recorded with Frank Zappa. He swings.

A year later Butler directed Ms. Day in “Lullaby of Broadway,” negligible despite a marvelous selection of songs, the book a coat hanger of cliches to support the numbers – an effort to which leading man Gene Nelson lends little. Too showy and slick to strike any sparks, he does his thing in a vacuum, intruding on her numbers, as does the unstoppable mugging of S.J. Sakall. Ms. Day brightens the picture whenever she is left alone.

In 1953 Butler did right by her, cementing her box-office cache with the Western musical “Calamity Jane,” perhaps the only film in which Howard Keel is reduced to an onlooker as Ms. Day steals every scene, singing in peak voice, dancing with spirited athleticism, taking Keystone spills, and mining every line for comic emphasis (she gets a laugh with “Whar’s the varmint?”). The gender-switching and cross-dressing is nonstop, and Ms. Day sets the tone in her very tight britches and masculine open-legged postures (a close-up of her perfectly manicured nails contradicts the image). You have to wait till the final 10 minutes for “Secret Love,” but the whole Sammy Fain-Paul Francis Webster score is seasoned, and Butler’s control of the material is consistently impressive.

Among biopic musicals, now undergoing a shaky renaissance, Charles Vidor’s “Love Me or Leave Me” (1955) is one of the hallmarks, certainly in the top five circling beneath “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” partly for the same reason – James Cagney, now older and squatter, but absolutely riveting. That Ms. Day holds her ground, manipulating him with arias of integrity while conveying the bitter calculating ambition that keeps her going, makes this a central film in her canon. Based loosely on Ruth Etting’s conflict with her thug husband and manager, Marty Snyder (a relationship not entirely unlike that between Ms. Day and her husband, Marty Melcher, whom she married in 1951), and his non-fatal shooting of her lover, pianist Myrl Alderman (Johnny in the film), the script is mostly fiction. Alderman is in the film 15 years before Etting actually met him, and the first scene has her working a dime-a-dance joint, something she did only in the 1930 one-reeler, “Roseland” (included on the DVD, along with an inferior 1932 two-reeler, “A Modern Cinderella”). All three were alive when the film was made, and fixes were undoubtedly necessitated. It doesn’t matter. The film leavens the crude flamboyance of speakeasy entertainment with comedy (Harry Bellaver’s sidekick to Cagney helps), but the stench of desperation is there in Ms. Day’s multifaceted performance, except when she sings and lights up. Etting’s sleepy-eyed sexiness and mournful nasality are no match for Ms. Day, whose interpretations of her 1920s songs all but wipes the originals from memory.

The Day persona – independent, clear-eyed – was now fairly fixed. (In Hitchcock’s 1956 “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” husband James Stewart patronizes her with a sedative, but it is Ms. Day who saves the day, twice.) In 1958 she made a transitional comedy for Paramount, George Seaton’s “Teacher’s Pet,” a prelude to the series of sexual innuendo comedies to follow. One of the first movies sent out to test theaters trying to get by on single features instead of double-bills, it is a smart city desk comedy, in which Ms. Day once again holds her ground against old Hollywood.

Clark Gable was a quarter of a century older than she was and looked it, but he clearly enjoyed reusing his comedy chops, despite a few too many goggle-eyed double takes – occasionally sending up attitudes he made famous in “It Happened One Night” or learned first-hand from Captain Bligh. The film goes unaccountably soggy in the last half-hour, as niceness spreads like pollen, but the first three-quarters, despite a lack of credibility, make it a durable candidate in the newspaper comedy sweepstakes; no “Nothing Sacred,” but pretty funny all the same. Ms. Day’s journalism teacher brings Gable’s misogynistic, egghead-hating editor to heel while losing her own officiousness, entering breasts first. Gig Young got a lot of mileage as a know-it-all professor, and Mamie Van Doren, “the gal who invented rock ‘n’ roll” (a number Day parodies – shades of Irene Dunne in “The Awful Truth”), tells Gable that Young is dreamy and “must be from Hollywood.”

The remaining Warner titles have moments, many moments. From the opening tracking shot of John Raitt, you can see that director Stanley Donen is set on undermining the staginess of “Pajama Game” (1957); he no more succeeds than do the screenwriters in injecting a plot. Carol Haney and Eddie Foy Jr. are fun, and Ms. Day sings “Hey There,” but Barbara Nichols is stuck playing a character named Poopsie and Bob Fosse’s fey, hunched shoulders, quasi-beatnik numbers, once the toast of the town, have dated no better than coonskin caps, also popular at the time. Charles Walters’s “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” (1960), a not entirely glowing view of the marriage of Walter and Jean Kerr, might also have been called “Mortimer Brewster Builds His Dream House”; it opens with fine comic business by Ms. Day and her four sons, but as the story kicks in, the humor is leeched out, though she stays the course – well backed by David Niven and Janis Paige. “Jumbo” (1962) gets bogged down in widescreen circus vistas and Stephen Boyd’s anti-charisma (his singing was dubbed by one James Joyce), but Ms. Day has a glorious Rodgers and Hart score to sing, and Jimmy Durante and especially Martha Raye to play off. A worthy highlight is her duet with Raye, herself a gifted vocalist of the 1930s, on “Why Can’t I.” The Busby Berkeley finale is more outrageous than clever, and very long. Frank Tashlin’s unjustly forgotten “The Glass Bottom Boat” loses itself in slapstick at the end. and it’s weird to see Dom DeLuise imitating Jerry Lewis, but the gags are built ground-up, and Ms. Day times them out with the precision of a silent clown.