The release next Tuesday of four unadorned DVDs in an MGM film noir series illustrates the fluid nature of movie rights. The films were produced by independent companies and distributed through either United Artists or RKO, having nothing to do with the MGM lion. Two of them, “The Stranger” and “Kansas City Confidential,” even floated into the public domain, surfacing regularly in scratched, dingy prints. Those two are now restored, along with the less enchanting “A Bullet for Joey.” The best of the quartet, “The Woman in the Window,” is also presented in a fresh, sharp transfer, but with a bright projection that slightly undermines cinematographer Milton Krasner’s inky blacks.

The absence of extra features with these films is surprising given their cult status and the ready supply of able commentators, including actor Colleen Gray, who was badly interviewed on a previous DVD of “Kansas City Confidential.” Other extras might have included the Lux Radio Theatre version of “The Woman in the Window,” an interview with Orson Welles on “The Stranger,” and the kind of anti-communist newsreels that helped fuel the early 1950s gangster pictures, including “A Bullet for Joey,” in which the crooks are heroes and the gangsters are evil cold warriors.

Three of the films star the spellbinding Edward G. Robinson, who knew all the tricks about holding and controlling a scene. By the 1940s, Robinson didn’t have to do much: The bullfrog face, sonorously harsh voice, disarming smile, and perfect posture were enough — a cocked finger served as his exclamation. The years 1944 to 1949 represented a peak for him, the last in a long career: “Double Indemnity,” “The Woman in the Window,” “Our Vines Have Tender Grapes,” “Scarlet Street,” “The Stranger,” “The Red House,” “All My Sons,” “Key Largo,” “Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” and “House of Strangers.” He created incisive characterizations in each, including his gentlest (“Our Vines”) and his most pitiless (“Key Largo”).

But Robinson didn’t see it that way. For him, “Double Indemnity” represented the indignity of third billing; he recalled the others in terms of political arguments on the set or the insufficient status of his co-stars. He quarreled with Welles and claimed to sleepwalk through two great Fritz Lang films, “The Woman in the Window” and “Scarlet Street,” both shot by Krasner and co-starring Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea.

One wouldn’t suspect any of this from watching the films. Robinson rivets the other actors as easily as he does an audience; in scene after scene, everyone’s eyes are glued to him. You have to see “A Bullet for Joey,” one of the many films he made in humble penance for his left-wing politics, to see him on automatic pilot, exiting the jerry-built sets as though he can’t wait to go home. Still, he gives the film what little buzz it has.

Although “The Woman in the Window” (1944) has much in common with “Scarlet Street” (1945, available in a superb transfer from Kino), it is tonally and thematically different, as much about voyeurism and middle-aged impotence as the wrong turn that can undo a respectable life. Robinson’s Richard Wanley has peaked as an assistant professor. He is an amiable club man, content in his sexless marriage, and willing, he concedes, to watch a burlesque stripper, but only if she comes to him.

She does, in the person of Joan Bennett’s Alice Reed, a high-priced call girl and photographer’s model who prides herself on her ability to read people. In Fritz Lang’s world, there are no wrong men, innocently accused, but rather suppressed men who, when the ego is distracted even momentarily, break loose. I don’t know a better description of the noir universe and Lang’s place in it than in a letter written to a Jewish friend by the dying Octavius Augustus in John Williams’s bravura 1973 novel, “Augustus”: “Perhaps there is but one god. But if that is true, you have misnamed him. He is Accident, and his priest is man, and that priest’s only victim must be at last himself, his poor divided self.”

Lang sets up Wanley’s dilemma with two preludes: a fragment from a classroom lecture on the gradations of homicide, with shadowed bars holding him in place; and the vacation leave-taking of his family — a scene burlesqued a decade later in Billy Wilder’s “The Seven Year Itch.” From the moment Alice’s reflection appears in a window as Wanley stares at her portrait, virtual reality gives way to the real thing and poor Wanley is doubled by mirrors, especially those in her fun-house apartment, including a wall-size mirror surrounding a fireplace conspicuously decorated with a Greek key.

Perhaps the middle-classness of it all inclined Lang to a wittier touch, evident not least (spoiler alert) in the denouement. The dream framework is often assumed to be an add-on mandated by censors, though the whole film proves otherwise. Lang, in a typically ambivalent display of generosity to a character, insisted on the dream structure over vehement protests from the producer-scenarist, Nunnally Johnson. Lang didn’t think Wanley deserved self- or other-inflicted capital punishment. Still, it must be said that the dream can also be interpreted as the kind of reversal made famous in the Ambrose Bierce story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in which only the salvation is a dream, preceding death. Much of the story takes place in Wanley’s absence, but no one dreams episodes in which they do not appear. Either way, it’s a mischievously inspired ending.

“The Stranger” (1946) is usually dismissed as a Welles sellout, something done to prove to the studios that he could turn out a profitable programmer. I don’t buy it. For one thing, it is filled with the privileged shots and jokes we expect only from Welles, or in this instance Welles in tandem with uncredited screenwriter John Huston and over-the-top composer Bronislau Kaper. The latter’s score inserts pounding Rachmaninoff piano chords as foreign to New England as Welles’s Nazi, Franz Kindler.

True, the opening reels of a South American chase were destroyed and cut. True again, Kindler’s eyes are so shifty they seem to be on rollers. True also, Kindler greets an erstwhile comrade, Meinike (Konstantine Shayne), with the most shameless expository speech in the history of dramaturgy. But: The opening and closing sequences are delightfully stylized (note Meinike’s reflection in a camera lens); the film is never dull; Russell Metty’s photography is often ravishing; Robinson’s Nazi hunter is all-American gemütlich, especially in colloquies with a rotund ex-vaudevillian, Billy House; and the marriage between Franz and a Supreme Court justice’s daughter (Loretta Young) is a Freudian banquet. I’m guessing that Huston came up with the idea of Meinike’s “all highest” turning out to be God, and having him pray that God give Franz strength. God does, and Franz strangles Meinike to the tune of screaming brasses, ending in perfect unison decay.

Phil Karlson’s “Kansas City Confidential” (1952) helped to launch his eight-year run as a director of sleek, morally conflicted, violent B-thrillers. This one involves a bank heist, disguises, shifting identities, and an honest ex-con who is accidentally implicated in the curmudgeonly crime of an ex-cop. The hero is played by John Payne, who makes a convincing entry in noir after a decade of musicals and Westerns, and you cannot ask for better henchmen than Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, and, in perhaps his best role, Jack Elam.

Other than Robinson, the interesting element in Lewis Allen’s woodenly directed “A Bullet for Joey” (1955) parallels two sexual deceptions that aren’t fully developed. Audrey Totter looks as reluctant as her character, who is recruited to kidnap a Canadian physicist. George Raft wears his pleated trousers midway between waist and neck. The commies are stopped dead in their tracks.

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