War is hell; writing about war is Homeric. The settings, fighters, and armaments change, but the fervor, terror, heroism, cowardice, agony, resentment, egotism, majesty, relief, pain, death, joy, love, corruption, humor, and insanity abide, as does the desire to mythologize war’s grotesquerie. Unlike his progeny, though, Homer didn’t bother with scoring political points. Neither pro- nor anti-war, he offered no special succor to those appalled or elated by it. For that, we’ve got liberals, conservatives, and, for lack of a better term, libratives — those who count receipts before taking sides.

Three current DVDs — one in a first-time release and two rereleased in improved editions — partake of myth-making, and two of them document librative ambivalence. Like politicians who praise our troops to distinguish themselves from politicians who hate our troops, the Hollywood entries deride war but love warriors. “The Caine Mutiny” (1954) and “The Guns of Navarone” (1961) are products of World War II, the Hollywood blacklist, and producer Stanley Kramer’s tradition of moral certitude, which favors equivocation as the essence of artistic vision.

But first, consider the virtually unknown “Overlord,” a 1975 film directed by Stuart Cooper, an American who lived in England and has worked mostly in television. The film, which won festival prizes but not distribution in America, was produced by the Imperial War Museum, which gave him unlimited access to its immense collection of World War II footage. Working with Christopher Hudson, Mr. Cooper scripted a simple story involving an everyman soldier who is called to service and trained for D-Day (Operation Overlord), where he is an immediate casualty.

During the war, John Huston and other filmmakers courted controversy by staging scenes for putative documentaries. Mr. Cooper did the opposite, using footage taken from the RAF, Germans, London Fire Brigade, newsreels, and other sources to fill out the surreal, terror-filled tableau that frames his soldier’s painfully ordinary travail. Some footage is familiar from nonfiction films such as the great British documentary “The World at War,” made in the same years as “Overlord,” yet takes on an intensified urgency in this context. Instead of illustrating a historian’s narrative, it paints the maw into which men are channeled like debris in a sluice. The fireworks that represent fierce nighttime battles and the bomber-bay shots of descending missiles landing in step-by-step patterns punctuate the steady tramping of feet into harm’s way.

As a technical achievement, “Overlord” is remarkable: Cinematographer John Alcott (Stanley Kubrick’s cameraman) worked with 1940s lenses to match scripted scenes to the archival material, and Jonathan Gili’s editing is so precise you cease to distinguish what is real and what is staged. This feat would mean little if Mr. Cooper and his lead actor, Brian Stirner, had not succeeded in creating an illusion of layperson realism; comical, lyrical, and artsy interludes notwithstanding, the film has the kind of quiet confidence that seems to eschew the very professionalism it embodies.

“Overlord” is not about heroics, yet the archival footage is testament to the heroics that will win the war. The everyman, Tommy, is an object lesson in depersonalizing techniques that reduce soldiers to sacrificial lambs, cannon fodder — “Die of boredom, die in battle, what’s the difference?” As the military machine gets bigger, the men get smaller, Tommy observes, until there is nothing left. Two moving sequences involve women: An aging prostitute (Lorna Lewis) with terrifyingly aggressive eyebrows tries to seduce Tommy in a movie theater showing the Nazis goose-stepping to “The Lambeth Walk,” and an innocent but astute young women (Julie Neesam) engages his imagi-nation with a kiss until the film abruptly returns him to the bumping reality of a transport truck.

Mr. Cooper explains, in a commentary track, that the repeated, fuzzily prescient image of a soldier shot down while running toward the camera was inspired by a Robert Capa photograph. That image is one of several that attempt to lift “Overlord” to the level of myth in which Tommy’s death is as preordained at the invasion’s success. A good deal of material is covered in 83 minutes, not all of it understandable without the commentary and other addenda provided by Criterion. Watching it cold, you may not recognize shots of Dunkirk or know what the strange barrel rolling out of the sea is. The DVD explains all, and when you watch the film again, its clarity is fairly overwhelming.

By contrast, nothing is clear in “The Caine Mutiny” and “The Guns of Navarone” but the desire to create rousing adventure, thumpingly underscored by the martial scores of Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin. Kramer assigned “Caine” to Edward Dmytryk, the once promising B-filmmaker and member of the Hollywood 10, who sought to rebuild his career after doing time and naming names. Herman Wouk’s novel was so widely read that Kramer insisted on a Classics Illustrated treatment, moving quickly among the most famous incidents — the tow-line, the missing strawberries, the typhoon, the trial, Captain Queeg’s breakdown, the mutiny, and the bizarre turnaround in which the lawyer announces that Queeg was a misunderstood hero.

The novel is dated less by the operatic melodrama — it’s still compulsively readable — than by small things, like Wouk’s prudish refusal to indulge in “billingstage” or his racist stereotyping of black stewards. The movie improves on the book in that regard; actor James Edwards’s steward doesn’t “yassuh” anyone.

For the rest, the film might have been written by Keefer, the villainous intellectual who finks at the trial. The movie gives a speech to Queeg, who requests understanding from his crew — a speech that later justifies the pro-Queeg turnabout, removing what little ambiguity Wouk offered. The film also de-ethnicizes Barney Greenwald, robbing him of motivation and the novel’s most memorable line: “I owed [Queeg] a favor, don’t you see? He stopped Hermann Goering from washing his fat behind with my mother.” And it makes Willie a man by marrying May, a more interesting, independent, and almost proto-feminist character in the novel.

The whole point of making Willy the story’s anchor is neutered by Robert Francis’s one-note performance of a one-note character — purely a mama’s boy. This allows the remarkable foursome of Humphrey Bogart, Van Johnson, Fred McMurray, and Jose Ferrer to kick out the jambs, keeping the ship afloat despite extreme fracturing of the hull. Dmytryk’s direction is pedestrian, involving none of Willie’s awe or Wouk’s conceit that the Caine mutiny is a modern myth, known “throughout the service.”

“The Guns of Navarone” doesn’t hesitate to proclaim its fake mythic status, beginning with James Robertson Justice’s plumy narration. As the critic Christopher Frayling points out in an interview that is the best of the new DVD extras, the film is constructed out of Greek legends, from the Minotaur in the labyrinth to Jason and the Argos. It was produced by Kramer’s former partner and scriptwriter for “High Noon,” Carl Foreman, who fled the HUAC hearings to re-establish himself in London; he assigned the direction to J. Lee Thompson and neither of them would do anything nearly as good again.

The direction of a complicated film is certainly efficient, and the grand adventure, however improbable, continues to hold up. Yet possibly because the producer was disinclined to waste expensive location footage, the action slows at times to a crawl, like an unedited documentary. Many scenes have no tempo at all.

Foreman, who wrote the script, added many thumb-suckers about war, but in the nuttiest scene, he throws the bathwater out with the baby, as Gregory Peck, in perhaps the worst line-reading of his nobly uneven career, lectures David Niven on his responsibility to the team. Niven’s response is priceless: You can’t tell if his character is chagrined or if Niven himself is wondering what the heck got into Greg. Either way, this is the kind of antiwar film that could double as a recruiting tool. “Navarone” is a librative theme park, each episode another ride.

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