The new James Stewart DVD box is one of the odder entries in Warner Bros.’ Signature Collection. Given the possibilities of Stewart’s Warner and MGM work — minus the Hitchcock, Lubitsch, and Ford films elsewhere deployed — they might have included neglected gems, like “The Mortal Storm,” “Come Live with Me,” or even his most endearing instance of miscasting, “Born to Dance.” But those are pre-war films. This set of six movies (available individually except for two late-autumn Westerns — “Firecreek” and “The Cheyenne Social Club,” which share one disc) explores the years 1949 to 1970, when Stewart evolved into a beloved national treasure while specializing in maniacs fixated on revenge.

Stewart did his best postwar work at Universal and Columbia. Even so, this selection includes one masterpiece,”The Naked Spur,” and three historical glosses that, taken together and despite various and often robust failings, define his uncanny persona: part stuttering innocence and part bellowing fury, the twain meeting in sullen, wary silences.

The Hollywood studios lost their bearings in the late 1940s. They also lost their theaters to antitrust, their audiences to television, their writers to red-baiting, and their stars to changing tastes and independent contracts. As of 1941, Stewart had never cracked the box office top 10, but he had grown into a reliable commodity. When he returned to movies in 1947, having flown 20 missions as a bomber pilot, he confronted a new Hollywood with a sure-fire bet — Mr. Smith reuniting with Frank Capra for a feel-good Christmas pageant.Yet “It’s a Wonderful Life” unaccountably tanked. Follow-ups, including Hitchcock’s maladroit “Rope,” did little better.

Stewart turned his career around with “The Stratton Story” (1949), directed by Sam Wood, a baseball blockbuster that finally landed him in the top 10, where he resided for the next 15 years. As a war hero, Stewart was in no danger from HUAC suspicions or subpoenas to serve as enabler. Wood, however, was an inquisition cheerleader and his oeuvre has long been ignored because of politics and his humorlessness in dealing with the Marx Brothers. This is unfair: His pictures merit derision in their own right. A more-than-capable craftsman who worked exceedingly well with actors (other than the Marxes), Wood balanced momentum and sentimentality with anodyne conventionalism and noble sacrifice.

Wood’s penultimate film must have seemed very déjà vu, as he had already shed tears for “The Pride of the Yankees” and severed Ronald Reagan’s legs in “King’s Row.”The Monte Stratton story concerns the White Sox pitcher who lost a leg in a hunting accident, yet returned to the game. Stewart has a field day: He gets to play a man half his age, confirming his boyish innocence; marry June Allyson for the first of three times on film, patenting sweet-tooth cuteness; and enjoy a five-minute self-pitying freakout, portending things to come. Unfortunately, Stewart could not pitch. Everyone raves about his fastballs, but except when a stunt pitcher is sneaked in, they all go high and outside. Still, he had a point to make: Like Stratton, wounded veterans needed to find themselves.

That theme turned manic in the five superb Westerns he made with Anthony Mann, his most frequent collaborator in the 1950s. Notwithstanding the 1939 parody “Destry Rides Again,” Stewart was an unlikely candidate for a genre that John Ford and John Wayne had made their own. Yet he brought something new to it: the battle-scarred victim of treachery who overcomes obstacles of nature and villainy while rediscovering his own scabbed-over core of decency. Before Mel Gibson, Stewart may have been the most shot, whipped, beaten, betrayed, and left-for-dead movie star in Hollywood history. In his final Mann Western, “The Man From Laramie,” he takes a bullet in the palm and lets out a cry (“You scum!”) that for sheer agony cannot be beat.

“The Naked Spur” (1953) is perhaps the best in the series, not least for counting as one of Mann’s equally compelling three films with Robert Ryan. The script, by Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom, is set in the Colorado spur (the title is a triple pun, also suggesting boot wear and motive) of 1868. Stewart is an amateur bounty hunter, tracking a murderous old acquaintance to finance the repurchasing of his farm, which was embezzled from him by his fiancée during the Civil War.The background is of less importance than the chess game involving the film’s five players. Pretending to be a sheriff, Stewart inadvertently picks up a prospector (Millard Mitchell) and an amoral ex-soldier (Ralph Meeker) as they attempt to take Ryan and his woman (Janet Leigh) to Texas. Except for an Indian band that the soldier forces them to massacre, no other actors appear.

Equally vital is the setting: Other than oddly angled close-ups (like the one of Leigh’s face and Ryan’s grizzled chin), Mann constructs every shot in a way that embeds the actors in the bluffs, caverns, and rivers of the journey — much of it profoundly beautiful.The film’s decisive influence on the Budd Boetticher-directed Randolph Scott Westerns that followed is unmistakable, not only in the geography-as-fate setting and character-driven minimalism, but in the contrast between the dour putative hero and Ryan’s killer, whose every line is delivered with a charmingly addled giggle.

For all the meticulousness in script, design, and performances,”The Naked Spur” is dotted with a few minor imperfections and one big mistake: the former are badly-timed edits and a millisecond in which the prospector forgets his character’s name. Bronislaw Kaper should have been horsewhipped for scoring “Beautiful Dreamer” every time Stewart romances Leigh. Otherwise, the movie is corn-free — no romantic clinch in the startling denouement.

The other films in the collection are interesting mostly for Stewart’s mulish twisting between bashful affability and cries de coeur.The disastrous failure of Billy Wilder’s worshipful “The Spirit of St. Louis” (1957) has been blamed on public amnesia regarding Charles A. Lindbergh. The problem with that theory is the tremendous success of Lindbergh’s book a few years earlier.

One problem may have been the picture’s length: We can admire Lindbergh’s flight without wanting to spend an hour in his cockpit listening to voiceover. Yet the film is often compelling if regarded as a James Stewart ordeal rather than as a biopic. In the first half, he is winning and dedicated. In the flight half, he abandons the aviator’s legendary cool to screech every melodramatic line — “Ice!” “You’re stalling!” “It’s Ireland!” and, inevitably, “Oh, God, help me!” (backed by Franz Waxman’s Biblical epic music). The script is filled with flashbacks played as comedy, which befits a man of Stewart’s age, not Lindbergh’s (who was 25 and had been flying for about three years), especially since nothing is made of his childhood or background — where was his family during the big takeoff?

And where is organized crime in “The FBI Story” (1959), J. Edgar Hoover’s officially sanctioned valentine to himself and his homogenous bureau? When Stewart’s agent wipes out the KKK, it’s because they attacked Jews (or rather, “ancient devotions”) not blacks.There’s no point in belittling the inaccuracies. The fascinating thing about Mervyn Leroy’s 149-minute, Max Steiner-scored chronicle of tabloid headlines and personal crises is how despondent it is. Vera Miles, as Stewart’s wife, is as distraught as he is and the non-stop criminal enterprises are numbing, even if they don’t involve a single ethnic criminal. As one of Stewart’s instructors explains, “Craftiness can solve many a criminal case, but with hoodlums you sometimes need a good, conscientious, hard-working machine gun.”

That leaves the utterly inept and talky “Firecreek” (1969) a reworking of “High Noon” that not even Stewart and Henry Fonda can salvage, and the lightweight, yet often savory, “The Cheyenne Social Club,”leisurely directed by Gene Kelly.A tribute to America’s prostitutes — each one a generous, honest, innocent, feeble-minded beauty — it gets most of its laughs from Stewart’s and Fonda’s double takes; in fact, Fonda hasn’t been this funny since “The Lady Eve.” (The pecan-cracking gunfight is worth the trip.)

After that, it was mostly bit parts in forgettable films for Stewart. Robbed of his youthful allure, he looked old, worn, and uninterested.

Mr. Giddins can be visited at www.garygiddins.com.