Perversity looms over the very idea of a Tennessee Williams DVD set – and not the perversity of the playwright who located poetry, nostalgia, and the weight of the world in the hearts of gigolos and fading actresses. When a Hollywood studio packages, in the guise of homage, adaptations that are notorious for disemboweling the honored works, I hear the author rolling over and sighing, like his Reverend Shannon, a hapless, “Fantastic.” So it comes as a surprise to find so much pleasure in a collection that helps to define its time, if not its author. As an anthology of extravagant emoting, the “Tennessee Williams Film Collection” is hard to beat.

Williams may be destined for immortality, but the Age of Tennessee is long gone. From 1945 (“The Glass Menagerie”) to 1961 (“Night of the Iguana”), he was Broadway’s soul; as the theatrical magic waned, he peaked in movieland with the release of seven wildly uneven films between 1958 and 1962. The franchise was detonated in 1968 by a rank adaptation of “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore,” fittingly retitled “Boom.” The eight-disc Warner Bros. collection includes a 1973 Canadian television documentary, “Tennessee Williams’ South,” a disc of bonus features relating to “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and six films.

In the absence of sensationalism, talk is talk. We can only marvel at how much talk film audiences were ready to digest in the late 1950s, when the talkers were beautiful, happy endings were guaranteed, and everything was controversial. Williams gave equal time to mastication and masturbation, to psychoanalysis and cannibalism; few plays in his canon are bereft of someone who buys or sells companionship. Yet his talk requires virtuoso assurance, which to Hollywood often meant going English or importing from Broadway, even as the talk was adjusted for audiences west of the Hudson River.

Critics were riled by the censorship imposed on each movie, yet Williams has enjoyed no great cinematic revival in the years since censorship abated. In one instance, “Sweet Bird of Youth,” censorship partly improved on the original, turning an unbelievable denouement into acceptable melodrama. In another, “Baby Doll,” the absence of censorship seems remarkable even now.

Elia Kazan directed “Baby Doll” (1956) – an original Williams screenplay based on characters introduced in his one-act “27 Wagons Full of Cotton” (subtitled a “Mississippi Delta Comedy”) – on location with an improvisational bravura that suited a superb cast. It’s more than a comedy: It’s Williams letting loose and having fun, a feeling his work rarely underscores. Yet the 1950s audience drowned out the laughs with heavy breathing: Carol Baker’s thumbsucking virgin in a crib, and the shaggy cuckold joke played around her, smacked of pederasty at a time when the word virgin made Hollywood nervous. A wonderfully witty performance was lost in the lust, even as she defended her intellect: “I’ve been to school in my life. And I’m a magazine reader.”

Karl Malden, hilarious with and without dialogue (he moves like an addled rooster), exercises an unexploited comedic gift as Ms. Baker’s arsonist husband. Eli Wallach, making his film debut, oozes revenge and fake seduction, a twinkling light in each of his otherwise obsidian eyes. Mildred Dunnock’s dotty old maid inserts a third-act pathos, justified only by her skill. The film is long: too much sneaking in and out of doorways, too much enraged husband with a rifle. But Kazan’s agile camera, Boris Kaufman’s photography, and the actors, especially the luminescent Ms. Baker, carry the day. One privileged moment has no talk at all – just the Malden and Wallach characters staring at each other and scratching their heads on a staircase.

Kazan, of course, also directed “Streetcar” (1951) which, despite the deletion of a key line from the play (“We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning”) is an indelible film. The restored and crisply digitalized transfer captures Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh at their peak, and demonstrates how much movement can be generated in stagy settings. This edition includes a feature-length documentary about Kazan, an appreciation of composer Alex North, outtakes, and a 1940s Brando screen test – in all, a splendid package.

The splendor is mitigated in the other films, including the downright unwatchable “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” (1961). Though based on a novel, it is filmed more stiffly than the plays – inserted shots of the Spanish Steps do nothing to alleviate Jose Quintero’s stodgy direction or a script that teases self-parody (loneliness “is one of the great mysteries of the human heart”). Vivian Leigh’s commitment to the role can’t make it credible, and an embarrassingly miscast Warren Beatty (was Alain Delon busy?) plays an Italian gigolo with a high-pitched accent that veers between Bela Lugosi and Topo Gigio. That leaves Lotte Lenya, as a bloodsucking pimp in a red boudoir, the chance to steal the film in a warm-up for her more convincing turn a year later with James Bond.

Richard Brooks directed “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958) and “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1962), and deserves credit for keeping the former moving even though it isn’t moving toward anything worth reaching. For all the blather about mendacity, the film is about why Paul Newman won’t sleep with Elizabeth Taylor, and no answer is provided. He must be really angry to resist those engulfing arms and all they are attached to. The play locates the problem in homosexuality and adultery; in the movie, adultery is just a thought and homo-what? Never heard of it.

Ms. Taylor is riveting, in her snugly tailored slip; even so, it’s easy to imagine how much more provocative Barbara Bel Geddes must have been on stage, with her purring voice and washed-out innocence. Mr. Newman does yeoman work with a sabotaged part, though he occasionally forgets how much pain he’s supposed to be in. Once again, the property belongs to the heavies – Burl Ives as tyrannical Big Daddy and Madeliene Sherwood as a screamingly obnoxious Sister Woman.

“Sweet Bird of Youth,” on the other hand, benefits from the bowdlerization of a bad play with characters named Chance, Heavenly, Alexandra Del Lago, and Fly (“just like the fly, sir”), and a finish in which the selfish gigolo hero waits to be castrated while asking the audience, “Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.” By leaving Chance (an exceptional performance by Mr. Newman, recreating his stage role) with a broken nose and his girl, Brooks salvages most of the good dialogue and crafts a mostly satisfying movie that has more reality that Williams’s strenuous masochism.

Which leaves Williams’s final Broadway and Hollywood success, “Night of the Iguana,” a fascinating example of rendering onto Tennessee his due while rendering almost as much to the movie gods. As directed by John Huston, the first 27 minutes are marvelous – all back story, and primed to move. Instead of intrusive flashbacks, Huston uses the preliminary plot points as an excuse for cinematic dazzle centered on three stirring performances: Richard Burton as Reverend Shannon, perhaps the most compelling work of his film career; Grayson Hall as the group leader of vacationing biddies chaperoned by Burton; and Sue Lyon, who was always better than expected in her abbreviated teenage career. Much of the film is played as comedy, albeit of a cruel sort.

Then the play kicks in. The talk is relentless, though some of it is handily delivered by Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr, the latter an unlikely 40-year-old virgin. The film makes a few improvements on the play, sacrificing its original 1940 setting and the Nazi family, and intelligently illustrating the sermon that lost Shannon his church. But it adds a silly repose to the Hall character – in the play, Shannon calls her a dyke and she slaps him; in the movie, she doesn’t know what a dyke is – and an aberrant attempt at martyrdom on the part of Maxine, who is obliged to utter such expletives as “Jehosaphat” and “just a flipping minute.”

Huston would soon enter a few years in the wilderness, emerging with several of his best films. Burton would never reclaim his mantle. And Williams would settle off-Broadway, trying to make sense of an era that had tired of talk but had yet to succumb to a steady diet of special effects.