The Film Society of Lincoln Center is mounting a retrospective of Bing Crosby films – 13 movies and one teleplay – that may astonish those who recall only his road trips with Bob Hope. Crosby is the most conspicuously neglected of the Golden Age Hollywood stars, given his then unexampled popularity. He ranked in the top 10 of box-office attractions for all but five years between 1934 and 1954, and he was the only actor of his time to crown the polls for five consecutive years (from 1944 to 1948). He was nominated for three best-actor Oscars (winning for “Going My Way”) and introduced more Oscar-nominated songs than any other performer. All this while sustaining the most successful vocal and radio careers in the 20th century’s first half, in addition to building a racetrack and launching the first celebrity pro-am golf tournament.

Yet his persona, on- and off-screen, was that of an incorrigibly lazy man: self-sufficient, unperturbed, shrewd, cool – a grown-up Tom Sawyer, complete with pipe, hat, mismatched clothes, and jivey lingo. Crosby invented a screen character so perfectly gauged that even people who knew him had a hard time separating it from the real Bing, though obviously he was the least lazy man in town. The public perception of Bing – he was always Bing – as an easygoing all-American Joe probably contributed to his posthumous decline in popularity. The casual, laid-back attitude that proved so engaging during decades of Depression and war seemed remote and grandfatherly in the 1950s, when atomic cocktails, rock ‘n’ roll, and jet travel boiled the national tempo. Bing had grown older while the country grew younger.

Many of the qualities that worked against him posthumously were the same as those that briefly stymied him when he first sought a Hollywood career. He certainly didn’t look like a movie star, with his wingy ears, receding hairline, and expanding waistline. Nor did he behave like one when success arrived, refusing publicity, disdaining love scenes, populating his films with musician-friends, and refusing to be billed alone or above the title.

That last directive, which inclined David O. Selznick to pronounce him the smartest man in Hollywood, was entirely pragmatic: If a film succeeded, he’d get the credit; if it failed, he’d share the blame with co-stars. As a result, he helped launch the film careers of several leading ladies (the list includes Carole Lombard, Joan Bennett, Frances Farmer, Kitty Carlisle, Mary Martin, Joan Caulfield, and Rhonda Fleming) and men, notably the young Donald O’Connor. Bing’s idol, Louis Armstrong, was the first black artist to receive – at Crosby’s insistence – top billing in a white film, though he had only a cameo role.

From the first, Bing proved himself an inventive comedian (he apprenticed in Mack Sennett shorts), using the same impeccable timing that characterized his singing. His ability to ad-lib business or exude tranquil charm made his vocal interludes the pinnacles of his movies, and encouraged Frank Capra to declare Crosby one of the best actors in the business – a remark echoed by actors and directors as varied as Leo McCarey, Miriam Hopkins, Jane Wyman, Raoul Walsh, Robert Mitchum, Blythe Danner, Ray Walston, and George C. Scott. The Lincoln Center selection, curated by Martin McQuade with the participation of Kathryn Crosby (they will each introduce some of the screenings, as will I) leaves out a few of Crosby’s best films, but covers much ground and more than 30 years.

A marvelous film could be made about the making of 1933’s “Going Hollywood” (July 20 & 22). William Randolph Hearst financed it as a vehicle for Marion Davies, who held up shooting with lavish meals, rivers of wine, and an inability to memorize lines – yet, in the end, director Raoul Walsh and Crosby were banished from the MGM lot for 20 years. Davies is terrific (note the erotic 90-second close-up when she hears Crosby’s voice on the radio), but Bing steals this pre-Production Code satire with over-the-top musical numbers, demonstrating his gift for shtick on “Beautiful Girl”; swinging for the bleachers on the brief title song; emoting (“very Russian Art Theater,” he called it) “Temptation” while bingeing in a Mexican brothel; and guiding Marion through nauseating giant daisies (they were both high) during “We’ll Make Hay While the Sun Shines.”

“Pennies From Heaven” (1936) and the rarely seen “Sing You Sinners” (1938), both screening July 21, are quintessential Depression films, utopian visions of community that nonetheless mask corruption at the core – the former begins on death row; the latter applauds gambling as an alternative to labor. Crosby is a street-smart troubadour, envying no one and thoroughly independent. The Burke-Johnston score for “Pennies From Heaven” is a classic, but is upstaged by Louis Armstrong’s stunning performance of “Skeleton in the Closet,” which established his tinsel town credentials. “Sing You Sinners” hasn’t been shown in decades. Director Wesley Ruggles conceived it for the purpose of portraying Crosby as the appealing scapegrace his friends knew him to be. Upon reading the script, Bing said, “I guess I can play myself.” It’s not really a musical, and Bing doesn’t get the girl, though he tries to seduce his brother’s fiancee. Twelve-year-old Donald O’Connor wins a horse race.

“Anything Goes” (July 22), from 1936, is a fascinating mess. Lewis Milestone was hardly the best director for Cole Porter’s early masterpiece, but by the time the censors got through with the song lyrics and the libretto, all any director could do was sit back and pray. Ethel Merman preserves some measure of her Reno Sweeney; Ida Lupino wafts by, looking blond and great; Bing swings Hoagy Carmichael’s first movie song, “Moonburn,” and the few Porter tunes that made the cut; and if “The Shanghai-de-ho” by Robin and Hollander doesn’t drop your jaw, nothing will.

Victor Schertzinger’s 1940 “Rhythm on the River” (July 24 & 25) increases its cult standing with each screening. For one thing, the Billy Wilder-Jacques Thery story (as scripted by Dwight Taylor) involves an ingenious deconstruction of pop songwriting. A burned-out tunesmith (Basil Rathbone) hires, unbeknownst to each other, Bing and Mary Martin to write songs with him. Rathbone weds Crosby’s music to Martin’s words, and writes nothing, but collects royalties and public adoration. Bing is perfectly splendid, especially rendering James Monaco’s best melodies and drumming his way through a jazz number that features Wingy Manone and Bing’s Rhythm Boys partner Harry Barris. Oscar Levant is a bonus.

Schertzinger also directed 1941’s “Road to Zanzibar” (July 24), though to hear observers tell it, he merely called for action and then sat back to see what Crosby and Hope would say and do – they had rival writers feeding them material not in the script. The second of the road movies hasn’t got a sentimental bone in its anarchic body, and mandated a stream of outcries from the censors. Production Code chief Joseph I. Breen advised, “There must be no evidence of the slave trader pointing up the breasts of the slave girl when he says, ‘Sambo wocky-dockies,’ and Hope’s reply, ‘I’ll say she has.’ ” This is the one in which Bing and Bob find tribal drums in a cavern and send the wrong message; in which Dorothy Lamour pretends to be a slave and the victim of lions; in which notable black actors Noble Johnson, Leigh Whipper, and Ernest Whitman play cannibals.

Leo McCarey’s 1944 “Going My Way” (July 24 & 25), once the most lucrative film in the history of Paramount Pictures, is now a neglected masterpiece, dismissed as sentimental and simplistic. It is neither – the tears it elicits are as hard-won as those in, say, Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar.” James Agee praised its verisimilitude, which may seem incomprehensible now, but McCarey and Crosby set out to re-create their own childhood experiences in Catholic gangs that never committed crimes more threatening than stealing pies or turkeys. The Crosby-Barry Fitzgerald relationship has lost nothing to time, and Bing’s performance is astonishing – convincing, engaging, and utterly original. Don’t miss the close-up of Rise Stevens when she sees Crosby’s white collar. What other actor would have had the nerve to sit at another man’s bed and sing him a lullaby? This great film, much of it improvised on the set, is overdue for reconsideration.

The second teaming of Crosby and Fred Astaire, one of the most popular releases of 1946, was the Technicolor extravaganza “Blue Skies” (July 22 & 23), directed by Stuart Heisler and featuring Joan Caulfield, one of those blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, alabaster blondes who seemed born for saturated color schemes. The film is wall-to wall Irving Berlin (about 20 songs), and the plot one of the strangest in any Hollywood musical, featuring Crosby as an obsessive-compulsive creator of nightclubs who loses interest in them as soon as they open, just as he loses interest in his wife and daughter. The finale is strictly Happy Ending 101, but the body of the film is as dark as the Martin Scorsese film it influenced, “New York, New York.”

Billy Wilder made his name with the script for Ernst Lubitsch’s “Ninotchka,” but his own quartet of films about Americans abroad never quite jelled, perhaps because he usually made the Americans unsympathetic. He hated “The Emperor Waltz” (July 25 & 26), a huge hit when it was released in 1948, but he was much too hard on it. Beautifully filmed in Canada, the picture is perhaps too fond of its doggy-sex jokes, and Crosby demonstrates little chemistry with Joan Fontaine. Yet his performance perfectly realizes the character of the arrogant, bumbling American (he plays a phonograph salesman in the time of Franz Joseph) who believes he and his country will inherit the world. His first appearance in court is memorable, and if the romance and music are less than riveting, the underlying conceit sustains its own heat.

George Seaton directed two of Crosby’s key dramatic performances, in “Little Boy Lost” (not in the series) and “The Country Girl” (July 20). Crosby’s first wife, an alcoholic, had just died and Bing himself had been known as a binge drinker in his youth, so Seaton hesitated in sending him the script for the latter. But he agreed instantly to play his most daring role. To make the part of Frank Elgin work, an actor must create opposing characters: the irresistible entertainer who radiates goodwill on stage, and the guilt-ridden boozer and liar who makes everyone else’s lives miserable. Grace Kelly and William Holden are fine, but like the characters they play, they end up supporting Crosby. A memorable interlude is Bing’s barroom duet with bosomy chanteuse Jacqueline Fontaine; his parting shot to her is a choice ad-lib.

“High Tor” (July 24) is a find – a theatrical debut, in fact – originally broadcast in 1956 on the CBS series “Ford Star Jubilee” and little seen thereafter. Directed by James Nielsen and based on Maxwell Anderson’s play, to which Arthur Schwartz added mostly undistinguished melodies, it is remembered as the American debut of Julie Andrews – airing just five days before she opened in “My Fair Lady.” For fans of high camp, however, it may linger in the memory for an extremely croaky performance by Everett Sloane (you know, Mr. Bernstein in “Citizen Kane”). Shot in 12 days, this Hudson Valley fantasy is a most peculiar time capsule, as sleepy as Rip Van Winkle himself. The print, provided by Kathryn Crosby, is reportedly pristine.

“High Society” (July 20 & 23): Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Grace Kelly, Celeste Holm, Cole Porter songs, arrangements by Nelson Riddle and Conrad Salinger. It’s damned near perfect, despite the smug source material (“The Philadelphia Story”), and then some – for example, the trumpet obbligato as Bing sings “Little One.”

Blake Edwards’s 1960 “High Time” (July 23 & 26), the original old-guy-returns-to-college flick, works overtime at snappy visuals, but still has to make do with Fabian, Richard Beymer, and leading lady Nicole Maurey. Also, Bing in drag. Also, Bing flying through the air in his graduation gown. Tuesday Weld is cute, however, and Bing got to introduce a brand new song, for which Sinatra was undoubtedly very grateful: “The Second Time Around.” Maybe it’s improved with age.

Finally, Gordon Douglas’s “Robin and the Seven Hoods” (July 23 & 25), from 1964, is another pooch, marking the end of the Rat Pack: Indeed, it was because Sinatra quarreled with Peter Lawford that he was obliged to pay Crosby a king’s ransom to portray Alan A. Dale. He shows up past the midway point and – guess what? – commits total larceny. Crosby comes across as the only unruffled pro in a sea of over-exerting scene stealers; he sings “Style” in tandem with Sinatra and Dean Martin and all but renders them invisible. Edward G. Robinson parodies himself, Frank sings “My Kind of Town,” Sammy Davis Jr. dances a tribute to armaments: a truly bad movie truly worth seeing once.

Once the movie musical went into terminal decline, Crosby was harder to cast. The television detective Columbo was initially offered to him – he wisely declined. He unwisely returned to the priesthood in “Say One for Me,” but proved surprisingly effective as two contrary doctors – the philosophical alcoholic in “Stagecoach” (a futile remake, made savory by his performance) and the eponymous serial killer in “Dr. Cook’s Garden” (an early made-for-television film).

By then, he preferred to be on the golf course or at the track. Mostly, he preferred to be with his family: his young wife, the former Kathryn Grant, and their three children. He had made a botch of his first family, though his marriage to Dixie Lee, which produced four boys, had been publicly perceived as a template for America’s domestic life. Good Catholic that he was – classically educated by the Jesuits at Spokane’s Gonzaga University (he dropped out before graduation to sing professionally) – he saw the second family as his second chance, and he grabbed onto it with both hands.

A generation came of age knowing him only for the Crosbys’ annual Christmas telecasts and his ubiquitous orange-juice ads. Aside from narrating a section of MGM’s self-celebrating documentary, “That’s Entertainment,” he disappeared from the screen. He planned a return, however: The script for his eighth jaunt with Hope neared completion at the time of his death, in 1977, at 74.

Until July 26 at the Walter Reade Theater (Lincoln Center, 212-496-3809).