Any list of the most enduring films of the Hollywood studio era is likely to include a few films by the Budapest-born director Michael Curtiz, who was among the top contract directors at Warner Bros. for an unmatched 28 years. Stylistically, his work is distinguished by inventive visual compositions, aggressive acting, quick cuts, fluid camerawork, shadowplay, location inserts, romantic and period realism, the kind of speed that results from keeping a story on track and free of distraction, and, above all, a shameless mastery of emotional manipulation.

Curtiz’s best films operate on the principle that the audience must be busy all the time — absorbed in verbal confrontations and elaborately staged fights, chuckling, or, when all else fails, shedding tears. No one could jerk tears like Curtiz, though many of his most lachrymose scenes are neither sad-sad nor happy-sad, just gratuitously sentimental. Think of 1942’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” which is fictional in plot and characterization but scrupulously researched in setting, jargon, music, and theatrical lore. When the script presented Curtiz with a third-act problem (i.e. many plot points but little music until the finale), he replaced musical numbers with crying numbers, three in a row — a marriage announcement, a birthday present, and a dead father — though only the last can logically justify the suds.

Less proficient directors who tried to imitate Curtiz in juicing up hopeless scripts learned how difficult it is. Roy Del Ruth, in the scurvy “West Point Story” (1950), desperately attempted to justify his ministrations by choking up the big finish, and failed. In the equally noxious, even more cliché-packed “I’ll See You in My Dreams” (1951), Curtiz incited blubbering whenever he pleased; the closing testimonial scene, complete with inserts of character actors who’ve mined their marks throughout the picture, is almost a parody of biopic insincerity — but nonetheless effective. Curtiz’s film was a blockbuster success.

Both of those films are now on DVD. “The West Point Story” is part of Warner Bros.’s “James Cagney: The Signature Collection,” which also includes Curtiz’s “Captains of the Clouds” (1942), an American analogue to Michael Powell’s British film of the same year, “49th Parallel.” Each is a recruitment poster staged in Canada, though only the Hollywood film indulges in the hero’s redemptive death and misogyny — its theme, in Tokyo Rose shorthand, might be: “Your women can’t be trusted so forget them and join the Army.”

Also included are three William Keighley wartime epics — 1940’s “The Fighting 69th,” in which Cagney dies to redeem himself in World War I with Pat O’Brien larding the sanctimony as Father Duffy; the intermittently amusing “The Bride Came C.O.D.” (1941), with Bette Davis striving for lightheartedness; and, best of all, 1940’s “Torrid Zone,” a politically indifferent and consequently lively retelling of “The Front Page,” in which Cagney, O’Brien, and Ann Sheridan seem to be having mucho fun.

“The West Point Story” is distinguished only by Cagney’s stiffbacked dancing (when he isn’t throwing punches), Virginia Mayo’s walleyed beauty, and Doris Day’s impervious energy, magnetism, and voice. Ms. Day gets a worthier showcase in “The Doris Day Collection Volume 2,” which includes her first two films, both directed by Curtiz: the mildly enchanting “Romance on the High Seas” (1948) and the vitally sadomasochistic “My Dream Is Yours” (1949), a high-water mark in Curtiz’s long series of show business movies.

The other films, in declining order of interest, are Del Ruth’s “On Moonlight Bay” (1951) — an essential postwar text, as illustrative of that confused era as any noir; Del Ruth’s more conventional if spirited sequel, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” (1952); “I’ll See You in My Dreams” (1951), in which Danny Thomas impersonates the lyricist Gus Kahn as a sexually recalcitrant squirrel; and Jack Donohue’s “Lucky Me” (1954), unlucky but for the wasted oomph of Ms. Day and Phil Silvers.

When Curtiz is celebrated at all, which isn’t often, it is for his “serious” entertainments: his early exercises in horror, Errol Flynn swashbucklers, and those putatively isolated triumphs, “Casablanca” and “Mildred Pierce.” Yet almost from the time Warner imported him in 1926 on the basis of a prolific career in Hungary and Austria, he showed a stubborn fascination with American show business. He left few aspects unexplored, from minstrelsy (1930’s “Mammy”) to Elvis Presley (1958’s “King Creole”) to nonmusical films that explore radio technology (1947’s “The Unsuspected”) and the showmanship of sports (1951’s “Jim Thorpe: All American”). Only “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “White Christmas” have evergreen status, but Curtiz touched on jazz, nightclubs, operetta, vaudeville, and Broadway in more than a dozen other films.

If one theme animates Curtiz’s work, suggesting a stronger thematic hand than is usually credited to a studio pro who didn’t generate his own projects, it is the plight of the outsider, alienated by nationalism or class. Curtiz’s show business idylls invariably dramatize the fragile and temporary triumph of the entertainer. In Ms. Day, he found a vessel for his obsession. He allowed her to prevail in only one film, her first, “Romance on the High Seas,” a mistaken identity farce by the Epstein brothers (who wrote “Casablanca”), punched up by I.A.L. Diamond.

“Romance” has a famous Jule Styne/Sammy Cahn score, sumptuous photography and set design, an all-too-rare specialty number by Avon Long (whose stage career stretched from “Porgy and Bess” to “Bubbling Brown Sugar”), amusing dialog mining white jive talk of the period, balloon-crazy Busby Berkeley choreography, and a cheerful gloss on money-burning paranoia and tipping practices among the super rich.

Ms. Day’s subsequent films with Curtiz are less benign. She ends up in platonic isolation in 1950’s “Young Man With a Horn.” As a composer named Grace LeBoy in “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” she invents and controls Gus Kahn’s career, but at the cost of any recognition of her own talent. “My Dream Is Yours” represents her deepest work with Curtiz. It begins deceptively as a mildly satirical look at the banality of radio and the popularity of crooning, with Curtiz characteristically exploring studio architecture and the sponsor’s domination.

Lee Bowman plays the arrogant, alcoholic singer Gary Mitchell, to whom women are fillies in a stable. He betrays his agent, Doug Blake (Jack Carson, the film’s top-billed star), who goes to New York to create another radio phenomenon. Through a “live” jukebox trick, Blake hears Martha Gibson (Ms. Day), the widowed mother of a young boy, and brings her to Hollywood, where she is shunned for being too “jazzy.” Mitchell, however, makes a play for her and she gives in to him — a shocking development in 1949, leading the audience to two erroneous presumptions: that she will ultimately change and marry him.

Each member of the triangle is calculating and self-involved, and the film is surprisingly cagey in keeping the involvement between Martha and Gary off-screen, unknown to Blake or the audience. Amid familiar gender reversals (Blake mocked for his apron-wearing kitchen duties), Martha flourishes while Gary goes on a binge and is blacklisted. Blake falls vainly in love with her.

In one of the strangest digressions in a Hollywood movie, the film’s point of view suddenly becomes that of Martha’s son, who dreams a Friz Freling-animated sequence in which Bugs Bunny meets Martha and Blake, who dance to Liszt in humiliating bunny outfits. In the end, she gives up Gary (the film’s great mistake is in overdoing Gary’s monstrousness without allowing us to see whatever it is that enchants Martha) and turns to Blake as a door-prize husband — gratitude and security in the absence of love and sex, a future as bleak as those bunny outfits. The new songs by Harry Warren and Ralph Blane are inferior, especially compared with old songs in the score, but the Technicolor effects of Ernest Haller and Wilfred Cline are dazzling, the lower precincts of the entertainment world are knowingly displayed, and Ms. Day provides exactly the right ambiguity with a sparkling smile that gives nothing away.

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