Today Warner Bros. releasing eagerly anticipated DVD collection “Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4,” with 10 films (as opposed to the usual five). One might think that a “Vol. 4,” by definition, is an exercise in barrel scraping, especially when it generously offers five double-features. But all of these films are worthy, and most are better than worthy. Nor will this set stem the tide: Several major noirs are tied up in legal knots or forgotten and many others await restoration. Noir is practically a bottomless pit.

The period covered here is 1946 to 1955; seven films were initially released in 1949 and 1950, a dramatic high point in noir and the careers of the directors involved. These filmmakers, working in a then-déclassé genre with diminutive budgets and short shooting schedules, were working at a fevered pitch of inventiveness. They wanted to prove themselves worthy of being pushed up the ladder to A-pictures, with all the attendant glamour. Many of them succeeded, making better pictures in better circumstances, but they lost something in the process.

Consider the respective prostitutes in Fred Zinnemann’s 1949 nail-biter “Act of Violence” and his Oscar-endorsed 1953 epic, “From Here to Eternity.” In the former, Mary Astor plays a worn-out, middle-aged hooker whose pathetic attempt to justify her life (“I had my kicks”) is a memorably haunting refrain. In the latter, the well-scrubbed Donna Reed is presented as a “hostess.” The chiaroscuro photography that typifies these films, turning familiar localities into shadow-streaked cells, is doubly fitting; they were made on the dark sides of the studios, bound by Production Code rules, but permitted faux-documentary peeks into the nation’s grubbiest corners.

Despite the always impressive location exteriors filmed around Southern California, New York, Boston, and elsewhere, realism is not really the point. Nor is the plot, although the twists and turns keep us guessing. Most of the stories, after all, are no better than average pulp. The art is on the surface, in the way directors, photographers, editors, and actors use composition, lighting, cutting, and improvisation to make each sequence a little different than it would usually be done. The payoff is that cinematic style imparts its own substance.

“Act of Violence” is a perverse variation on “Les Misérables,” in which the Valjean character, Van Heflin’s Frank Enley, has remade himself as a model citizen, his face reflecting the cherry contentment of postwar upward mobility. But he has a terrible crime in his past and it has not been expiated. The Javert prototype, Robert Ryan’s Joe Parkson, tails him across the country — by appearances, a scowling, crippled madman bent on brute justice. In the end, Joe’s face will radiate serenity, but only after he chases his quarry into an underworld that is more Virgil than Hugo, with Astor’s whore as the sibyl.

This stuff is no more profound than it sounds, yet Zinnemann, cinematographer Robert Surtees, and the terrific cast impart a reverberant significance that supersedes the literary ostentation. That applies to most of the films in the Warner set, including the one paired with “Act of Violence”: John Sturges’s scrupulously shaped, Boston-based, forensics motivated “Mystery Street” (1950). Ricardo Montalban encounters racism, upper-crust contempt, Harvard, and Elsa Lanchester in pursuit of the man (a particularly malevolent Edmon Ryan) who killed the pregnant hooker played by Jan Sterling.

Nicholas Ray’s “They Live by Night” (1948, but shelved for a year) and Anthony Mann’s “Side Street” (1950) are an ideal double bill, not only because both cast Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell as a troubled couple, but because the competitive tension, whether deliberate or not, is out in the open. Ray’s film opens with a benchmark helicopter shot of fleeing thieves, but Mann outdoes him with a breathtaking introductory helicopter shot, looking straight down on the Empire State Building, transforming the city into a steely Grand Canyon.

Both films deal with makeovers: In Ray’s film, O’Donnell metamorphoses from an introverted plain Jane into an opalescent beauty. Mann turns Granger from a caricature of sunlit innocence into a man on the run, trapped in the canyon, frightened, beaten, mangled, and last seen on a gurney being loaded into an ambulance as a cop narrator assures us, “He’s gonna be all right.” Mann’s eerie car chase is a stunningly effective commentary on city constraints. “Side Street” holds a key place in Mann’s oeuvre for depicting a young man making the mistake of a lifetime — unlike his subsequent Westerns, in which the hero’s secret is always buried in the past.

Still, “They Live by Night” is the better film, a painfully instinctive love story that captures the feeling, time, and tempo of Edward Anderson’s marvelous Depression novel, “Thieves Like Us.” Ray intensifies visual symbols (Howard Da Silva’s thief has a glass eye instead of a deformed foot), shoots in close quarters, dispatches the gang to focus on the lovers, and breaks for a musical number — Marie Bryant, of “Jammin’ the Blues” fame, leading a band with trombonist Vic Dickinson. He also allows O’Donnell’s Keechie to avoid the novel’s holocaust. Robert Altman’s anthropological 1974 remake also spares her; only Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), itself a loose variation, adhered to Anderson’s pitiless example.

Those films are relatively familiar. The real gifts in this collection are the rarities: André De Toth’s “Crime Wave” (1954), John Farrow’s “Where Danger Lives” (1950), John Berry’s “Tension” (1949), and Jack Bernhard’s zbudget “Decoy” (1946). There is much pleasure to be had here, not least in the lovely form of Jean Gillie, whose femme fatale in “Decoy” may be the nastiest of all. She takes such unseemly pleasure in firing a gun.

Shot for shot, beginning with gas jockey Dub Taylor impersonating Doris Day, “Crime Wave” delivers a succession of jolts as a slightly bent but very tall cop (Sterling Hayden) solves a series of pennyante burglaries in which the unlikely couple of Gene Nelson (the dancer from “Oklahoma”) and Phyllis Kirk (the beauty in De Toth’s “House of Wax”) are trapped. They are surprisingly good, as is everyone else in a film that is at once intimate and oddly objective, employing natural lighting and sound. Shot mostly at night, it somehow manages to subvert a sentimental curtain line.

Claude Rains appears in “Where Danger Lives” for all of six minutes, as Robert Mitchum mutates metamorphoses from princely doctor and fiancé to Maureen O’Sullivan to slow-on-the-uptake boy-toy for the ever-pouting Faith Domergue, who has psychiatric problems. Mitchum is finally reduced to groveling semi-consciousness as Domergue is consumed in the second-best (after “Touch of Evil”) border-town sequence ever made.

Except for its atrocious Andre Previn score, “Tension” (1950) is an eccentric joy, with Audrey Totter giving the performance of a lifetime as an extremely unfaithful wife. The first scene is pretty shocking even now: She turns a trick in her husband’s all-night drugstore. Eventually, the husband (Richard Basehart), upset with her and possibly with the soda jerk who likes him too much, reinvents himself with a foolproof disguise involving his glasses (he takes them off). He immediately meets Cyd Charisse, cast rather counterintuitively as the girl next door. You have to see this one to believe it.

The remaining films are in on a pass: Don Siegel’s South American adventure, “The Big Steal” (1949) and Lewis Allen’s remake of “The Mouthpiece,” tailored for Edward G. Robinson as “Illegal” (1955). Don’t miss co-star Nina Foch’s commentary track on “Illegal,” a picture she despises. On the costumer: “My breasts are not my largest feature.” On Lewis Allen: “He was a nice man. He just wasn’t a director.” On co-star Jane Mansfield: “I never was fascinated by sex symbols. They always just made me nervous. It may have been jealousy. I don’t know. No, I don’t think so.” She continues in that vein for 88 minutes.

Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”