The three-strip Technicolor process, introduced in the 1930s, flourished for nearly 20 years, bringing to fulfillment the idea of painting with a camera. Doomed by a bulky system of prisms, high cost, broiling lights, and subsequent innovations that resulted in a simpler, more natural-looking solution, it left an uneven legacy of movies defined by aggressively splashed and deeply saturated hues.The three strips, each representing a primary color, dyed the filmstrip, thus defining the contrasts – the way a painter might situate a red coat against a blue sky. Its primary drawback and most lasting virtue were one and the same: the luscious artificiality that, combined with soundstage fakery, banished realism.

The effect is symbolized for many by the moment when Dorothy opens a sepia door onto the paint-box hysteria of Oz. But even in nature a cameraman like Leon Shamroy could turn reality into a measured likeness, as in “Leave Her to Heaven,” the 1945 thriller that sustains attention primarily as a visual coup. By the early 1960s, filmmakers as different as Jerry Lewis (“The Ladies’ Man”) and Michelangelo Antonioni (“Deserto Rosso”) were painting sets and spraying lawns to drench images in color. Today’s color photography is so accomplished that almost any effect is possible, including wistful replication of Technicolor’s heyday, as in Todd Haynes’s “Far From Heaven” (2002). Yet it isn’t the same. The three-strip process produced an effect hovering between rank vulgarity and sensual dazzle – Hollywood’s dreamscape.

Recent and forthcoming DVDs reproduce the palette more effectively than ever before, and though they can’t simulate the experience of Ava Gardner’s visage lighting up a 35-foot screen, the sprucing-up is good enough to redeem more than a few middling films. If Paramount’s “The War of the Worlds” (1953), a George Pal production directed by Byron Haskin, had been shot in black and white, it would survive, at best, as a Cold War curio, albeit a prophetic one in its focus on the military-religious complex.

This is a picture in which a Catholic priest freely barges in on a tactical base and Gene Barry shouts at soldiers caught in the Martian holocaust, “I’m looking for some Pacific Tech professors!” The moral (underscored by a choir singing “amen”) is that God dispatched the invaders because “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” (Not as farfetched as the Spielbergian vision that sacrifices New Jersey to make Tom Cruise a better dad.) As photographed by George Barnes, the film pops off the screen, the lighting – particularly during night scenes – calibrating every tone as carefully as the depth perception. Frying eggs in real life are pale imitations of those sizzling under Barnes’s eye. The prologue, a newsreel conceived to simulate the subversive scenario of Orson Welles’s radio version, is practically three-dimensional.

A more sublime canvas is rendered in the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger masterpiece “The Tales of Hoffman,” which Criterion is finally releasing on DVD later this month. In this instance, the British filmmakers began with a recording of the Offenbach opera in modified form, conducted by Sir Thomas Beechum. The film was designed as a visual complement to the playback, and there is hardly a frame that does not glitter. The decor and actors are drunk with color (makeup as well as costume); the story is told with radical imagination involving rapid cuts and camera tricks; and the divide between formal dance and casual movement is thoroughly breeched. A horror film about debased love with a bleak conclusion countered by its overwhelming sensuality, “The Tales of Hoffman” unfurls in a stream of witting,outlandish visuals – many of them unforgettable, including Moira Shearer’s dislocated head and Robert Helpmann’s malevolent face. True, it’s an opera; true, it’s a dance; yet it is the purest kind of filmmaking, where music and motion underscore the rigors of Hein Heckroth’s design, Christopher Challis’s camera, and Michael Powell’s eye and tempo.

The Technicolor lacks Hollywood’s deep-focus precision – middle-distance shots fade – but the scheme is erotically charged and, for once, the material suits and is suited by the riot of color. Flames appear to charge from Hoffman’s head in the prologue, real sets and drawings are used interchangeably,foregrounds are adorned with dreamy hangings,and water infuses the sky. Coming 13 years after the Criterion laser disc,which restored the “Antonia” episode, the DVD uses the same 125-minute print (not 127, as the sleeve insists); the 138-minute original may no longer exist,but fans will be disappointed to find that the extras still do not include a rundown of what is missing.

Paramount is similarly chary with explanations as regards the ballyhooed deal it cut with the John Wayne estate to release movies that had been removed from the market for a quarter-century. In its profuse celebration of Wayne’s Batjac Company, delineated in hours of documentary appendages, the riddle of withdrawal is never broached. A few of the best titles, including Budd Boetticher’s superb Western, “Seven Men From Now,” are scheduled for release later in the year. The first release focuses on titles once frequently televised and therefore desired by movie lovers of a certain generation.

In one instance, the longing is justified. John Farrow’s “Hondo” (1953) stands up almost as well as the films Ford and Hawks made with Wayne during that period – though, as with all of Wayne’s own productions, it spouts gratuitous commandments about patriotism and rugged individualism that the older filmmakers would have blue-penciled. Originally shot in 3-D, it suffers from too many objects hurled at the viewer, but the photography by Robert Burks (Hitchcock’s cinematographer at the time) and pioneer Archie Stout (who shot one of the definitive Technicolor showpieces, Ford’s “The Quiet Man”) is scrumptious, and the chemistry between Wayne and “plain” Geraldine Page, making her movie debut, redounds to the benefit of both.

The other releases will likely try the patience of all but the terminally nostalgic. “The High and the Mighty” (1954), a film much glorified in its absence, is shockingly inept, given the subject matter of a distressed airplane and the ability of William Wellman, that flying ace among directors.The writing and acting are laughable, though not to the extent of campy fun,and the suspense is undermined by moments like Jan Sterling wiping off her makeup to stand revealed as Robert Helpmann’s doppelganger. Wellman also filmed the unbearably talky air-corps propaganda, “Island in the Sun” (1953), in black and white and notable only for Wayne use of the Yiddishism “tockhas.” “McLintock!” (1963), long bootlegged in faded and panned prints, looks gorgeous in this authorized print, but the fun the cast has sloshing about in a mudslide will be shared only by those with a high tolerance for spanking – one of Wayne’s less appealing habits (see the much superior “Donovan’s Reef” for more) and in no way mitigated by glib references to “The Taming of the Shrew.”

Next week, 20th Century Fox will release expansive two-disc anniversary editions of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals “State Fair” (1945),”Oklahoma!” (1955), and “The Sound of Music” (1965), and they haven’t looked this good since they were initially unspooled. On the other hand, they are Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals – a genre that fills millions with pleasurable anticipation and a few miserable churls with acid reflux.I can speak with authority only for the latter,who bewail their humorlessness, their condescension toward rustic Americans and all other cultures, their pretense of taking on serious subjects, and their touristy approach to romance, not to mention corn as high as an elephant’s eye. Two more insulated urban Manhattanites than R&H never lived, and yet they rarely deigned to write about what they knew, unlike, say, Gershwin (notwithstanding “Catfish Row”), Cole Porter, or Jule Styne. Everything that R&H touched turned to desert.

Still, they were tuneful fellows, and even those who could care less about whether Curly will ever get it on with Laurey or Jud or whoever may find their capillaries swelling to “People Will Say We’re in Love,” as well as the superb Eastman Color photography of “Oklahoma!” courtesy of the great Robert Surtees. The disc also includes the Todd-AO version of the film, which a documentary seems to favor, though the colors are dim by comparison. As Julie Andrews joyously notes, everyone loves “The Sound of Music,” the happiest of all musicals involving Nazis, excepting “The Producers”- and Robert Wise’s opening travelogue, a steal from his overhead opening in “West Side Story,” is brilliant, as are several other stagings of songs (not including “Climb Every Mountain,” “So Long, Farewell,” and several others).You may have to retire to find time to enjoy all the extras, a sampling of which I found more enjoyable than the movie.

The best of the bunch is “State Fair,” the only R&H score written for the movies, and shot by Shamroy with a three-strip richness more caloric than the songs, including “It Might as Well Be Spring”- a contender for their best ever.I wish it had been assigned to Dick Haymes instead of that lip-syncing, ravishing bride of Technicolor, Jeanne Crain. The film benefits from cheery performances by Charles Winninger, Vivian Blaine, Dana Andrews, Harry Morgan, and Donald Meek, and from show-biz talk, something R &H did know about.Yet they had to go and ruin things with an endless paeon to Iowa that is characteristically demeaning (I speak as an erstwhile Iowa resident). The close-up of Crain at 19:10 exemplifies the Shamroy touch – her lips, scarf, complexion, the night sky all imbued with deep, tactile colors, as if by a brush. As an extra, the DVD includes the atrocious 1962 remake, an example of color photography sagging into anonymous flatness. But since it’s sort of free, you can go directly to 49:30 for its one compensation: Ann-Margret’s disrobing and dance frolic.

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