Loosely speaking, the great musicals of Warner Bros., Paramount, and RKO were made in the 1930s, the great musicals of MGM were made in the 1950s, and the great wartime musicals were made at 20th Century Fox. The Fox musicals are often dismissed as clichéd escapism. For one thing, they can least afford the offhanded treatment traditionally accorded movies by early television and revival houses — the butchered 16 mm prints, scratched by projectors and faded by time. If the colors don’t pop off the screen to engulf the senses and the tempo is undone by commercial interruptions, the Fox experience is fatally compromised.

Further, the best of them are built around an actress so comfortable in her own skin that she never had to rouse herself to rouse us. Instead, she invites our gaze, encouraging the voyeuristic impulse of women no less than men, to look her up and down and marvel at the way she fills out her sumptuous wardrobe, carries herself, delivers lines, and reacts, often with an unexpected wit. Alice Faye’s plain beauty — broad flat face, pug nose, eyes slightly too wide apart — offers a chameleonic tableau of protective generosity, even when mordant, even when suppressing an erotic yawn at her erotically challenged or inconstant beaus.

If any film series requires DVD redemption, it’s Faye’s musicals, which are well served by “The Alice Fay Collection,” a four-volume set that includes her breakthrough film, “On the Avenue” (1937); an undernourished dud with a few memorable moments, “Lillian Russell” (1940); and two Technicolor spectaculars, “That Night in Rio” (1941), and Busby Berkeley’s near masterpiece, “The Gang’s All Here” (1943).

All are superbly restored. Indeed, the last two can double as tests for video equipment. The best of the uneven extras, which include a few stodgy featurettes and an informative commentary by Miles Krueger, are two shows from the radio series Faye starred in with her husband of 54 years, Phil Harris.

Faye was a musical Garbo, without the mystery or ennui. Often characterized as the girl next door (in what neighborhood would that be?), she provokes the deep pleasure of unrequited familiarity. Yet if these qualities ought to ensure her ongoing reputation as a queen of her genre, they also isolate her. The songbirds that preceded, rivaled, and followed her were, each in their own way, live wires. If they didn’t dance, they belted, and if they didn’t belt, they emoted full bore. Faye did none of that: She was almost always exquisitely languid, a mistress of understatement, especially when singing.

The archetypal Faye moment is usually set at twilight, as she positions herself against a wall or column, tilting her head slightly as the camera comes in for a nearly invasive close-up, and she lends her warm and hale but undemonstrative contralto to a ballad. A passive dish served in Technicolor splendor, she allows us to devour her face, her makeup, her eyes — nothing more, but it’s quite enough. Faye was one of the finest vocalists of her day; along with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, she inspired songwriters, turning their work into hits that became standards. Unfortunately, she was not permitted to capitalize on them.

Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, a little man with an oversize cigar and relentless appetite for self-aggrandizement and fleshly proofs of his power, may have been one of the few people who, like Fitzgerald’s Monroe Stahr, understood “the whole equation” of filmmaking. Yet synergy baffled him. He refused to allow his stars to plug his pictures on radio unless they made direct reference to him, and he refused to let them make records, perhaps fearing that success in another medium would weaken his control. This put Faye at a disadvantage, although even when she did record film songs, in 1936 and 1937, her dimly arranged versions fared far less well than covers by Billie Holiday. After her stardom crested, she was contractually barred from recording: In 1943, she introduced “No Love, No Nothing” (“The Gang’s All Here”) and the wartime anthem “You’ll Never Know” (“Hello, Frisco, Hello”), but the recorded hits were scored by Ella Mae Morse and Dick Haymes.

Still, Zanuck made her a film star before he eventually drove her out of the business. Ridiculously young when she made her way from chorus line to featured parts on stage (she was 13 when she lied about her age and joined the Chester Hale Troupe), Faye soon became a protégé of Rudy Valle, who faded from filmdom as she rose, initially in the guise of a Jean Harlow replica. Zanuck allowed her to be herself: normal, quietly intelligent, droll. He also had the insightful idea of complementing her rectitude with the liveliest wire of all, Carmen Miranda. With her flashing eyes, rolling midriff, eloquent arms, unremitting energy, English-mangling temper, and costumes no one else would dare wear, Miranda was the volcanic id, setting in relief Faye’ssometimes heartbreaking cool.

Roy Del Ruth’s “On the Avenue” (1937) puts its best foot forward with an opening 10-minute stage number featuring Faye and the lunatic Ritz Brothers; rubbery-faced Harry Ritz sings a parody of “Cheek to Cheek,” introducing his brothers (“Dr. Matzohball, who invented the maypole”), and dancing in lockstep with them. Faye is third-billed, which means she loses Dick Powell (no loss) to a gorgeous Madeleine Carroll, while stealing the film from both. Between her close-ups and reading of the line “I love plumbers. And garbage men,” she takes all the marbles. The plot, leavened by Irving Berlin’s score, involves a family of zany plutocrats and a denouement that explicitly prefigures “The Philadelphia Story.”

Faye is miscast as the eponymous faux operatic star in 1940’s “Lillian Russell,” a film devoid of coherence and drama. The story is censored within an inch of Russell’s life. Faye honors the costumes and sets, and it is perversely fun to see Henry Fonda, who did not lightly surrender a scene, reduced to a stooge by old pro Helen Westley.

Plot was not a Fox strong suit. Stir the plots of every Fox musical in a barrel and you won’t have enough gruel for a single Deborah Eisenberg short story. Yet to say that Fox preferred style to substance misses the point. Fox style is its substance. This becomes clear in the Latin trinity, beginning with “Down Argentine Way,” which Faye abandoned because of illness (Grable took over). Three-strip Technicolor had arrived and Fox went all the way with it. Faye returned for the improved follow-ups “That Night in Rio” and “Week-End in Havana.” Irving Cummings made up for “Lillian Russell” with “Rio,” recycling an old Maurice Chevalier vehicle that allows Don Ameche to play twin roles: One gets Faye, the other Miranda.

The stars are shiny and bright, and the music, especially the Brazilian numbers by Miranda and her Banda La Lua, are lively enough to overcome the comic relief, but the real star is the photography by two of Technicolor’s primary innovators, Leon Shamroy and Ray Rennahan. Every shot is painted with cartoon-like precision, as green areas are suddenly disrupted by touches of red or white or yellow, the chromatic design creating a luster that, along with the percussion, sexy dancers, and costumes, underscores the cheerfully carnal elation of adults at play.

By contrast, “The Gang’s All Here,” which has never looked this good (this is a film in which looks are everything), takes an entirely different approach to the saturated hues of Technicolor. Shot by Edward Cronjager, who had recently proved his bona fides with Lubitsch’s “Heaven Can Wait” (1943), it has a darker grain, as though the color stock were combined with monochrome. The deeper hues are set against a constant refrain of black. Faye sings “No Love, No Nothing” against a black background in profile, looking like a porcelain cameo. The big Berkeley set pieces are among his best and most notorious: a 10-minute “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat,” a single-entendre coupling of giant bananas and supine strawberries, conducted by Miranda, who is posed in one of the great matte effects of all time; and the 20-minute finale, interrupted by a brief plot diversion, so that the film can finish in song.

The great achievement here is that Berkeley directed almost the entire film with the scrupulous dislocation and theatrical hyperbole that characterizes his musical numbers. Once derided as overbaked and inept, and then rediscovered as fashionably campy, “The Gang’s All Here” weathers its years with remarkable grace. More than most musicals of its vintage, it is rather timeless, because it undercuts the suffocating morality of most 1940s films by cutting it off at the knees. For all the superficial merriment, the film plays up a core of real dissatisfaction in the insincerity that animates most of its relationships.

Faye never starred in another musical after “The Gang’s All Here” (though she made an ill-advised return for the 1962 evisceration of “State Fair”). In 1945, she starred in Otto Preminger’s undervalued “Fallen Angel,” falling for Dana Andrews’s grifter and making a man of him, but her scenes — and a song (again, she was replaced by Dick Haymes, this time in a juke box number) — were cut, and she walked off the lot never to return. She once recalled that Zanuck said something to her so vile that she knew she could never work there again, though she wouldn’t repeat what it was. For the next eight years, she and Harris enjoyed a top-rated radio series, in which a frequent butt of the humor was Zanuck, a producer forever trying to lure her back to the fold. With these DVDs, she is back in clover.

Mr. Giddins’s most recent book, “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books,” is available from Oxford University Press.