For the past 50-plus years, you had about as much chance of seeing a complete print of a 1940 Bing Crosby vehicle called “If I Had My Way” as you did of, say, the initial seven-hour version of “Greed” — which is to say no chance at all. Admittedly, there wasn’t much demand for it. Still, while “Greed,” the lost grail of cinematic obsession as practiced by Erich von Stroheim, was permanently sacrificed to greed, Universal held onto what a company archivist assured me was a “pristine” interpositive of “If I Had My Way.” The studio just didn’t want anyone to see it. But more about that in a moment.

As of today, you can buy the complete “If I Had My Way” for less than six bucks, or a fifth of the retail price of “Bing Crosby: Screen Legend Collection.”This is one of Universal’s generous (if elemental — not even a chapter index, though English and French subtitles are included) DVD clearance packages. Previous offerings collected horror films and enough Abbott and Costellos to induce delirium. Next week, Universal will issue at a bargain price the seven key Preston Sturges comedies as “The Filmmaker Collection” (who comes up with these titles?), which rank among the most insidiously funny movies ever made.

The present Universal series aims to soothe completists. Each volume dips into the sediment of great careers for five pictures, some long forgotten and deservedly so. In addition to Crosby, the others released today resurrect obscurities by Cary Grant and Rock Hudson. They will require the curiosity of those determined to see a tuxedoed Grant posing in drawing rooms before he learned to act, and Hudson aglow with ManTan as a Baghdad freedom fighter back when insurrections were a good thing.

The Grant quintet is somniferous despite promisingly campy situations, like “Big Brown Eyes”(1936),a schizoid Nick and Nora wannabe directed by Raoul Walsh with Joan Bennett as a manicurist-turned-reporter and Grant as a detective doubling as a gender-confused ventriloquist. Grant plays a beautician who learns that beauty is only skin deep in “Kiss and Make Up” (1934), and a blind pilot determined to save aviatrix Myrna Loy in “Wings in the Dark” (1935).

The Hudson collection is made savory by two sought-after directorial oddities. Douglas Sirk’s deceptively nostalgic small-town elegy “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?” (1952) explores a recurring American fantasy: A millionaire seeks to enrich others but ultimately pulls Babbitts out of his hat. The film owes as much to Sirk’s mise-en-scene as to the crusty ebullience of co-star Charles Coburn.

Robert Aldrich’s “The Last Sunset” (1961) is a benchmark in Western pathography, involving incest and suicide as Hudson’s sheriff seeks a man with “a hole in his chin,” played to order by Kirk Douglas. If the camerawork, traveling over mountainous terrain, borrows from the Anthony Mann playbook, the first shot of Dorothy Malone reeks of sexual unrest á la Aldrich.

“The Golden Blade” (1953), Hudson’s Iraqi escapade, is exuberant, but anyone who can last through “The Spiral Road” (1962), in which Doc Rock goes to the Netherlands and defies God, is likely to end up feeling the way Rock looks after God defies him back.

The Crosby set wins by a tonsil: Even when all around him turns to shtick, der Bingle remains a great singer in peak voice. The low point in the set is the naval recruitment orgy, “Here Come the Waves” (1944), an incessant Mark Sandwich musical with Betty Hutton as twins, though only one is as annoying as Betty Hutton. The joke is that Crosby plays a Frank Sinatra-style crooner, clutching a microphone stand as a swooning woman is carried off on a gurney. Unhappily, Crosby’s weakness for blackface is exercised in a duet of “Accentuate the Positive” with dim-bulb Sonny Tufts — especially galling given the segregation that divided the armed forces.

Frank Tuttle’s “Waikiki Wedding” (1937), a megahit in its day, spurred interest in all things Hawaiian with its score (“Blue Hawaii,” “Sweet Leilani”) and scenic shots by master cinematographer Karl Struss. Dated by low humor involving a pig, it is polished by Tuttle’s imaginative staging and a neat plot device designed to fool viewers along with leading lady Shirley Ross. “Double or Nothing” (1937), sluggishly directed by Theodore Reed, leavens another millionaire-with-a-munificent-plan story with intermittent rewards, like Martha Raye’s azure-tinted fuax striptease, “It’s On, It’s Off.”

Of greater interest are the two films Crosby made at Universal as an independent agent and co-producer with director David Butler: “East Side of Heaven” (1939) and “If I Had My Way.” The former is a minor but swift-moving screwball musical festooned with inside show-biz jokes and a splendid cast led by Crosby and the curvaceously brighteyed Joan Blondel. Bing plays a purveyor of singing telegrams who gets stuck with an infant (surely the oddest box-office attraction of the era, Baby Sandy, who retired at four).

The mystery of the butchered “If I Had My Way” gets to the nub of why it was made. Crosby and Butler shared a love of old show business, especially vaudeville and minstrelsy. Crosby’s films are littered with references to that era (“Double on Nothing” has an interpolated vaudeville show). For this film, they contrived a story that allowed them to preserve on film a few figures who had faded from view many years earlier, especially the legendary minstrel Eddie Leonard, whose three-minute “Ida” is his only filmed legacy.

When the film was sold to television in the late 1940s, it was cut to 80 minutes from 94 to accommodate ads — not because of Leonard’s blackface number, as was widely assumed. All the vaudeville numbers were cut along with a solo by Bing’s 14-year-old co-star Gloria Jean. The missing minutes were thought lost: Even the personal copies of Crosby and Gloria Jean lacked sequences.

So now we have a pristine print. Great film? Hardly, but it is a highly entertaining mixture of lend-lease politics, show-biz lore, and social wish fulfillment. Support is provided by Charles Winninger, Allyn Joslyn, a squirrel named Crack, and a Monaco and Burke score; on the minus side, there is the ceaseless mugging of El Brendel, the fake Swede of vaudeville who — go figure — never stopped working or sucking the life out of every scene he was in.

Crosby is thoroughly appealing as Gloria Jean’s temporary guardian — warm but casual, skirting the temptation to jerk tears. For anyone interested in ancient show business, a frisson is provided by the one-line walk-ons by Grace La Rue, Trixie Friganza, and the man who established transvestitism in American entertainment and had a Broadway theater named for him, Julian Eltinge. He jokes about smoking cigars while dressed as a woman; for all the pearls and chiffon, he was as closeted as Ted Haggart.

Eddie Leonard, however, is magical. Unlike Crosby in “Ac-centuate the Positive,” his blackface is too much a part of historical ritual to offend. I doubt that even those who are offended can fail to admire his artistry. Here is the original moonwalk, the yodeling croon that attracted attention when minstrel Emmett Miller was revived on records a few years ago, the rhythmic panache of the 1890s. Crosby introduces him as “64-years-young,” but he was probably 70 and would be dead within the year. Leonard makes this film a significant time capsule, evoking the racial conflation of otherness and respect that animated minstrelsy before it caved into vicious stereotypes. He’s a missing link.

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