Anyone with an aneurism may want to think twice about “Ford at Fox,” a 21-disc salute to John Ford’s nearly three decades at Fox and its successor, 20th Century Fox. I’m guessing it weighs 15 pounds. After days of carrying it between home and office (an elevator trip), I notice enhanced biceps and labored breathing. Of course, the latter may reflect my susceptibility to these movies, which, as sure as the earth turns, raise my sights, gladden my soul, worry my intelligence, jerk my tears, undermine my assumptions, and play havoc with my critical convictions — repeatedly. Damn the health risks: For all lovers of cinema, “Ford at Fox” is one of the most magnanimous corporate gifts in memory.

It’s neither complete nor perfect, but taken together with recent Warner Bros. collections, it puts within bookshelf reach most of this very great artist’s surviving pictures. The Fox films, including five silent pictures, come from the years when Ford (1894–1973) was at a peak of critical prestige, the years when he was associated with the mists of American history rather than the conventions (many of which he invented) of the Western. John Wayne’s only appearance in this set is as a bit player.

Ford’s first Fox film, “Just Pals” (1920), a charming Buck Jones melodrama, introduces several themes that echo through his more mature achievements at Fox and elsewhere: They include a town idler who achieves purpose by protecting a child, uncertain parentage, misunderstood intentions, greed, the thin veneer of social order undone by short-fused hysteria, and the fragility of justice. For a director who drew on diverse literary sources, accepted many studio assignments, and lost countless studio battles, Ford was one of our most consistent filmmakers. Yet his perspective was neither static nor predictable. I find myself treasuring his collected works even more than the masterpieces because I care about what he saw and how he thought at each stage of his long career.

Ford was a master at presenting two opposing ideas simultaneously. A brass band blasts “Anchors Aweigh” and military men engage in ceremonial fisticuffs, and our first impression is: Ford patriotic blarney. Yet his military films are among the most devastatingly critical portraits of wartime lunacy made in Hollywood. Few American artists have addressed the myths with which we justify ourselves to God and our children with more trenchant analysis.

Ford earned his patriotism by seeing through veils of vast sadness; he understood why America is worth dying for and even forgiving, which can be a tougher chore. Battle hymns and bugle calls cannot drown out the misery of the broken families, disappointed lives, abandoned women, and expendable men he documents. Ford saw action in World War II and made many war films, yet he rarely filmed battle scenes with large numbers of anonymous casualties. His films focus on the individual and mourn each individual loss. His Westerns similarly focus more on preparations for war and graveyard aftermaths than on massed attacks with legions of stuntmen biting the dust. The Indian attack in “Stagecoach” is an entertaining aberration.

In “The Iron Horse” (1924), when one of three old comrades is killed, Ford’s camera focuses as much on the Indian behind the rifle as on his quarry. Ford particularized death. Typical of his two-handed exercises, the film introduces Indians as an ominous enemy; yet the worst of them are manipulated by a white renegade in native drag, and the settlers are saved not by the cavalry, but by Pawnees. In the expressionistic “Hangman’s House” (1928), a legionnaire announces that he must return to Ireland to kill a man, and his comrades rise to toast him, “Viva le commandant!” But in the end, the villain burns to death at such length that even the avenger has a brief moment of remorse.

Ford’s films often fall into small units within the larger genres (war films, Westerns, comedies). These units may intersect with one another and are usually united by a star actor: The cavalry trilogy is measured against the growing confidence of the John Wayne characters; the five Maureen O’Hara films (including the sublime 1941 Fox film “How Green Was My Valley”) deal with requited and unrequited sexual relationships; the three with James Stewart are part-burlesques of Western legends.

The Fox box includes some of the most important of these subcategory series. A Will Rogers threesome — “Doctor Bull” (1933), “Judge Priest” (1934), and “Steamboat Round the Bend” (1935) — consists of small-town idylls, anecdotal in nature, spontaneous in style. They are funny, nostalgic, gimlet-eyed displays of societies closed off by time, place, and prejudice. The heroic Henry Fonda masterworks detail America at successive crossroads: “Drums Along the Mohawk” (1939), “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939), and “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940), followed by “My Darling Clementine” (1946), a dark postwar rumination on the vulnerability of community and personal commitment.

These were glorious years for Ford: “Pilgrimage” (1933) is a chilling portrait of maternal possessiveness; “The Prisoner of Shark Island” (1936) offers a disingenuous defense of Dr. Mudd and a prophetic brief on attitudes toward torture; even the bowdlerization of Erskine Caldwell’s marvelous “Tobacco Road” (1941) is a significant, if obnoxious, film for exposing a family deficient in all the virtues Ford celebrates everywhere else.

One of the most neglected of Ford’s sub-units is the Dan Dailey trilogy, which treats the military as a community of pompous knuckleheads that sucks the life from its most dedicated men. Dailey was a former vaudeville hoofer whose signature gesture as an actor was an obsequious smile, begging for approval. The films he made with Ford begin with the great comedy “When Willie Comes Marching Home” (1950), and grow increasingly bleak and homoerotic in the misfire “What Price Glory” (1952) and the stunningly intricate 1957 Warner Bros. epic “The Wings of Eagles.”

In “Willie,” Dailey plays Kluggs (“like in jugs,” he tells the gorgeous Corrine Calvert as she deposits his identification in her décolletage), a good-hearted lay-about not unlike the hero of “Just Pals.” Kluggs enlists the day after Pearl Harbor, but he ends up antagonizing everyone in town when he isn’t sent overseas. He inadvertently parachutes into heroism, but even that adventure merely deepens the picture’s aversion to home-front pettiness. An extended joke involving Kluggs and alcohol was repeated in “The Wings of Eagles” with more grotesque implications. “What Price Glory” is an ill-judged debacle about two World War I soldiers who compete for Calvert but prefer each other; as a sex substitute, they have ritual punchfests of the sort that recur in “Wings” and Ford’s joyously sadomasochistic 1963 Paramount comedy, “Donovan’s Reef.”

“Ford at Fox” includes half of Ford’s work at Fox — more like two-thirds, considering how many silent films have been lost. It has 24 features, two wartime shorts (but not “Sex Hygiene”), and a good, if arty, documentary on Ford’s relationship with studio chief and hands-on producer Daryl F. Zanuck. Most of the films are new to home video, and those that have been released before have their original extras (commentaries, trailers). Many of the discs are double-sided, but the prints are mostly first-rate — quality control failed only on “What Price Glory,” which is marred by a white border in the first nine minutes and a poor transfer. As to the selection, the one regrettable omission is “Submarine Patrol” (1938), which would have been a better choice than the hapless “Four Men and a Prayer,” from the same year. “The Iron Horse” and “My Darling Clementine” are offered in two versions; “Wee Winnie Winkie” is here in black-and-white and in a restored gold tinting.

“Ford at Fox” includes a museum-shop-quality 168-page book of photographs and wonderful facsimile souvenir brochures from the premiere engagements of “The Iron Horse” and “Four Sons” (1928), making this reasonably priced set (even at the list price of $300, it breaks down to $12 per film) an irresistible bargain. All that’s missing is a table of contents for the discs and a relevant essay explaining the selection process and discussing the films in the set, particularly the two versions of “The Iron Horse.” Why is the international version restored and accompanied by an unrevealing commentary, when the American cut is longer and superior in every detail? On the other hand, discovering the wonders of “Ford at Fox” on your own may be the best way.

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