W.R. Burnett has gone the way of many best-selling novelists: into the pit of obscurity reserved for those who were treated well by the movies. He wrote something like 35 novels, none of which are presently in print, though films made from them live on. He worked on almost as many screenplays, from “Scarface” to “The Great Escape.” But who in an auteur-driven culture thinks of those films in terms of the writers?

Along with Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, Burnett invented modern American crime fiction. Hammett gave us the detective, Cain the toxins of mad love, and Burnett the professional criminal – organized (“Little Caesar”) and plebian (“High Sierra”), working out a heist (“The Asphalt Jungle”), and corrupting municipalities (“King Cole,” “Little Men, Big World,” “Vanity Row”). He also gave us two comedies of errors about the dark side of jazz, “The Giant Swing” and “It’s Always Four O’Clock.”

Burnett lacks the literary flair of Hammett and Cain, who are nearly adaptation-proof; it’s never just the story but the telling we keep returning to. After John Huston’s luminous “The Asphalt Jungle,” Burnett’s text reads like a novelization instead of the source material. Huston took everything good in it and added to it, generating performances so true to Burnett’s descriptions that it’s impossible to read about the crooked lawyer Emmerich, for instance, without visualizing Louis Calhern, or the master criminal Riemenschneider without hearing Sam Jaffe’s quizzical inflections.

Huston was an ideal director for Burnett. God doesn’t exist in the novels or the films. Huston’s constant theme is that it all ends in the grave, pal, so the only question is how you behave on the way. As Huston tells it, Dix the scowling hooligan of uncertain age (played by Sterling Hayden with a chilling lack of vanity) discovers a measure of his own humanity while leaking blood from a bullet hole and thus is allowed a semi-rapturous passing on the bluegrass of his old Kentucky home. No one else gets to leave the asphalt. Huston opens the film with a parody of John Ford – the horizon, shot from below. Only instead of cavalry marching across the perimeter, we see a police car coasting a junkyard’s rim.

“The Asphalt Jungle” (1950) is the most respectable of five films collected in the DVD bargain of the year, “Film Noir.” It’s also the only print that could stand refurbishing, though it’s graininess is a minor annoyance. The other four are as bright and welcoming as Venus flytraps, their masterly black-and-white cinematography primed to accentuate every stylized shadow. The only extras are optional English titles and uneven commentary tracks – the ones for “Gun Crazy” and “Murder, My Sweet” are quite good. But the movies are enough.

Postwar French film critics coined the term “film noir” to denote similarities between Hollywood’s new wave of brutal crime films. Most of these were B-pictures, the bottom halves of double features that played catch-me-if-you can with the Hays office and received little critical attention. No surprise there. The surprise was the tenor of the films. Bubbling under the surface were themes of change, bad luck, betrayal (especially by women), murder, urban cesspools, and the not-so-friendly police, whom one character in “The Asphalt Jungle” repeatedly refers to as “the happiness boys.” We had just emerged triumphant from an unparalleled slaughter – the boys came home, the Depression was cured, affluence to follow. So why were movies so glum?

Is it coincidence that many if not most major noir films had someone in cast or crew who later came a cropper of the Red Scare? Huston joined the march on Washington; Marc Lawrence and Hayden named names and wrote books about it. Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott, who directed the meticulously mannered Chandler adaptation, “Murder, My Sweet” (1944), were among the Hollywood 10. So was Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the astonishing “Gun Crazy” (1950) – though the credit went to his “front,” Millard Kaufman. Their films expressed social concerns, but they were rarely political. Looking at them today you get the sense that the filmmakers had more fun tweaking the censors than the status quo – for them, the censors were the status quo.

Burnett’s earliest contribution to noir was his work on “This Gun for Hire” (1942), which helped define the style. Based on Graham Greene’s ” A Gun for Sale, “it transferred the story to San Francisco, turned the hired gun’s harelip into a broken wrist, and bathed the action in patriotic twaddle. The film remains fascinating as the mutant love

child of two warring instincts – Paramount, looking for new stars in Veronica Lake and the unknown Alan Ladd (his blond hair dyed black), and the subversive instincts of the writers, Burnett and Albert Maltz (another member of the Hollywood 10) and director Frank Tuttle (a Communist who named names). Perhaps the shrewdest participant, though, was the influential cinematographer John. F. Seitz, who with Tuttle managed to configure one scene as a send-up of old-dark-house thrillers.

The film begins with a murder that is still shockingly brutal, making it a hard sell to garner sympathy for Ladd no matter how many dreamy close-ups he gets (plenty). The problem is resolved by having him victimized by scum even lower on the food chain: a sexually ambiguous sybarite addicted to peppermints (the incomparable Laird Cregar) and an industrialist manufacturing poison gas for the Japanese – played by a wheelchair-bound Tully Marshall, groomed to resemble a crazed John D. Rockefeller. A more damning critique, however, seems almost unintentional: The honest cop is a deadly bore and Lake, a singing magician doubling as government spy (really), leaves everyone dead.

If “This Gun for Hire” is halfhearted noir, Joseph H. Lewis’s “Gun Crazy” and Jacques Tourneur’s “Out of the Past” spin happily beyond the pale, though the problem of empathy remains. Movie lovers are content to revel in filmmaking that is, shot for shot, as stylish as anything from that period; the less aesthetically inclined may want to throttle Robert Mitchum and John Dall for not seeing through, respectively, Jane Greer and Peggy Cummins. Lewis’s film posits a split between the gun-crazy/crazy-in-love couple-on-the-run with the dreary life of small-town America. Tourneur’s film creates a different kind of split, between urban decay and small-town decency, where the hero – Mitchum’s former detective turned gas-jockey – vainly tries to escape his past.

A similar optimism upends Robert Wise’s otherwise lightning-fast and hard as nails fight movie, “The Set Up” (1949), filmed in real time with frequent shots of clocks (a device imitated four years later in “High Noon”). The always-compelling Robert Ryan is a noble loser who wins a match he’s supposed to throw. Wise’s contempt for the kind of people who attend boxing is surprisingly relentless, but worse than the gangsters who cripple Ryan in revenge are the awkward line readings by Audrey Totter, who has to cry tears of joy when she realizes that her man won’t have to fight anymore.

In fact, every one of these films has censor-mandated add-ons. In “This Gun for Hire,” it’s the dirty traitors; in “Murder, My Sweet,” it’s a cute ending chaperoned by paternal cops; in “Gun Crazy,” it’s a tacked on scene in which Bart and Annie commiserate about how rotten they are; in “Out of the Past,” it’s a liberating lie that allows Mitchum’s hometown girl to marry the town sheriff; and, most risibly, in “The Asphalt Jungle,” it’s a speech by the chief of police assuring everyone that most cops are not as dishonest as the one in the story. To be fair, Burnett had written that speech in his novel.

Mr. Giddins’s column on DVDs appears alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.