It’s an axiom that few great Hollywood movies are based on genuine literary classics, while a great many are based on hackwork, whether of the best-seller or pulp variety. If a book offers a cracking story but little ingenuity in sentence making, a first-rate picture can, as aborigines rightly suspected of cameras, steal its soul. A thousand adaptations of “Madame Bovary” leave Flaubert’s novel unscathed. One excellent rendition of “The Prisoner of Zenda” renders Anthony Hope’s briskly readable “classic” unread.

Emma Bovary and Rudolf Rassendyll are among the prisoners of Warner Bros.’ “Literary Classics Collection,” a largely entertaining compendium of six films made between 1937 and 1962, with a decided bias toward swashbuckling. Four of the films — two versions of “Zenda,” 1948’s “The Three Musketeers,” and 1950’s “Captain Horatio Hornblower” — revel in sword fights, while “Madame Bovary” longs for one and “Billy Budd” cowers in fear of them.

No publisher would box these novels as “Literary Classics,” yet they seem less disparate as movies, perhaps because, though there is a wide berth between Hope and Melville, actors like Ronald Colman and Robert Ryan or photographers like James Wong Howe and Robert Krasker are bound at the hip.

The two versions of “Zenda” bookend the five entries from the golden era of the studios and provide an exercise in contrasting styles of cinematography and acting: The 1952 Technicolor version uses the same treatment and script as the 1937 black-and-white film, with marginal tinkering in the dialogue. A literature major might even say that the DVD is an objective correlative to the plot — a doppelgänger disc about doppelgängers. Unlike Gus Van Sant’s remake of “Psycho,” however, the director of the 1952 “Zenda,” Richard Thorpe, framed his own shots: In practically every instance, they and the lighting effects are inferior to those of director John Cromwell and Howe 15 years earlier. (The color print, however, is in far better shape than its scratched predecessor.)

The 1952 cast is also inferior. Stewart Granger, as Rudolf, is built like a leading man and does a creditable job, but the shorter, older Colman had the timbre and timing of one. As Princess Flavia, Deborah Kerr is a deeper actor than Madeleine Carroll, but Carroll is a princess born to the manner. Most intriguing are the two Ruperts. In the 1952 version, James Mason plays the dastardly villain who escapes punishment with his hair plastered and baritone dripping with supercilious contempt. Yet it’s a conventional performance compared with that by Douglas Fairbanks Jr., often regarded as a dilettante actor, who steals the 1937 film with a curly-headed perm and nerveless laughter, personifying Hope’s original description of Rupert: “Reckless and wary, graceful and graceless, handsome, debonair, vile, and unconquered.”

Both films feature Alfred Newman’s rousing score, and each on its own is probably fool-proof — it’s “Richard III” with Clarence winning the day — but the first has the lapidary polish of a studio jewel and a bonus in vaudevillian Al Shean’s cameo as the court conductor.

The bright idea behind George Sidney’s “The Three Musketeers” was for Gene Kelly to choreograph the sword fights as dances — prefiguring the martial arts genre. The duels are definite high points. Yet the real stars of the film are editors George Boemler and Robert J. Kern, and stunt doubles Russell Saunders and David Sharpe, who manage to disguise the fact that Kelly’s contribution to many action scenes consists of inserts and the safer physical exertions. Kelly’s line readings and forced hilarity are unfortunate — a trial run for “Singin’ in the Rain,” where they were more appropriate. (Hollywood is so adept at turning drama into kitsch that when confronted with great kitsch, it resorts to parody.)

Still, the film is as visually bountiful as Lana Turner in her green plumes. Turner has a few happy moments chortling with Vincent Price, whose Richelieu pimps her out to D’Artagnan. If you’re wondering how they got that past the censors, consider the latter’s riposte to Van Heflin’s affecting Athos: “Then tell it to the wind of your own making!”

Vincente Minnelli’s “Madame Bovary” (1949) is one of those bitter pills you have to swallow to indulge bits and pieces of prime studio craftsmanship. The story is ludicrously framed by the trial of Flaubert (James Mason, poorly used), who narrates the story from a witness chair, couching it in reveries of such palpitating banality (“What are dreams made of? Where do they come from?”) that he seems to be arguing that evil romantic novels created Emma and that he, Flaubert, functioned as little more than a secretary taking notes. Matters aren’t helped by Emma’s grand entrance — Jennifer Jones liveried as Betty Crocker, serving breakfast to Van Heflin’s understandably befuddled Charles.

After 20 minutes or so, the film periodically comes alive as Minnelli dotes on Emma’s quandary, aided by Jack Martin Smith’s art direction — focused around mirrors that, as in “Snow White,” pitilessly reveal all — and lustrous black-and-white photography by Robert Plank. Visual conceits, from the celebrated eight-minute ball sequence (minimal dialogue, an aggressively mobile camera, and a climactic, vertiginous waltz), to the few seconds of the approaching hirondelle on the night Emma is betrayed by Rudolphe, realize the novel’s palette of sensual detail.

It’s remarkable how much feeling Minnelli derives despite the patronizing narration and facilitations: Charles is too noble to operate on Hyppolite, Homais is a village idiot, Lheureux relieved of his obsequiousness is a stock scoundrel (despite a powerful performance by Frank Allenby), and everyone is morally neutered. Flaubert was acquitted of corrupting France, but the Production Code convicted Minnelli’s film before his cameras rolled. Its virtues are brilliantly decorative.

The final two films take place during the Napoleonic wars — other than that, they are as different as Gregory Peck and Peter Ustinov. Raoul Walsh’s handsomely mounted “Captain Horatio Hornblower” literally begins in the doldrums but soon takes on the vigor of a seadog romance as the paternal captain harrumphs his way around Virginia Mayo and outfights a passel of Latin Americans who are either insane or ugly or both — they are brown-face minstrels, and evidence of how quickly America’s good neighbor policy faded. The plot is serviceable if shameless: As soon as Peck meets Mayo, you know that his wife will have to drop dead and her husband fall in battle. And so it comes to pass.

Ustinov’s “Billy Budd” (1962) is the most compulsively watchable film of the lot, though on a basic level, it is the least cinematic. Based on a dramatization rather than the Melville story, it feels at times like a photographed stage play. That it works even so is a tribute to Ustinov and photographer Robert Krasker, who insisted on shooting exteriors on a ship, creating deft images and the slight roll of becalmed waters (by contrast, the ship in “Hornblower” is as steady as a highway). The film also benefits greatly from an intelligent adaptation by Ustinov and DeWitt Bodeen of a Louis Coxe and Robert Chapman play and stunning performances by Ustinov as Vere, Terence Stamp as Billy, and Robert Ryan as Claggart. Mr. Stamp, making his screen debut, combines unearthly beauty with a penchant for line readings that sound entirely unpremeditated.

But Ryan — dark, coiled, implacable — makes this film something to watch and watch again, his every close-up defying a single interpretation and justifying Billy’s misreading. True, the script simplifies Melville’s ethical concerns: It invents another victim, ignores Billy’s silence about a potential mutiny, and, most annoyingly, concludes with patriotic fervor. Yet in Ryan and Stamp (whose commentary track is the set’s best extra, along with Tex Avery cartoons, relevant radio broadcasts, and a travelogue about postwar Britain), the film illuminates Melville’s horror tale of evil “struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!”

Mr. Giddins’s most recent book, “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books,” is available from Oxford University Press.