Since establishing one of the world’s first curated motion picture collections in 1935, the Museum of Modern Art has amassed an inventory of films hovering near 23,000 titles. Through the decades, MoMA’s movie holdings have provided the grist for countless academic studies and restorations. A duplicate print of “Metropolis” that MoMA acquired in the 1930s, for instance, has remained a key reference source for every reissue and restoration attempt made on Fritz Lang’s film.

But MoMA is in the film-showing business as well as the film-studying and preserving business. Through “A View From the Vaults,” a continuing screening series, the museum’s film department presents programs that highlight the keen curatorial flair that has kept MoMA on the forefront of film archives for more than 70 years.

“The collection is not here to sit in the vault,” a MoMA film department assistant curator and “A View From the Vaults” programmer, Anne Morra, said. “The collection is to be seen, it’s to be experienced and used to present and understand the larger view of film history.”

Although a substantial portion of MoMA’s film calendar is made up of director retrospectives and surveys of regional cinema that rely in part on print loans from filmmakers, producers, and other collections, “A View From the Vaults” offers a peek inside MoMA’s own archival larder.

“While we have not turned away from programming personality driven exhibitions or national exhibitions,” Ms. Morra said, “we’ve realized that one of our greatest strengths in what we do is in our collection.”

The current edition of “A View From the Vaults” incorporates 10 films produced by Warner Bros., RKO, and First National Pictures Inc. between 1938 and 1949. “The American feature film of this era was a commodity,” Ms. Morra said. “But it doesn’t mean that the work was not top-notch.” MoMA’s program boasts brand new prints of key films by several of the most reliable craftsmen the studio system ever produced.

Director George Stevens’s 1939 Kipling swashbuckler “Gunga Din” is easily the most entertaining endorsement of British imperialism ever made. The 1938 stage-play adaptation of “Jezebel” is a deftly paced melodrama that was right in director William Wyler’s 1930s wheelhouse. Wyler’s onscreen collaboration with star Bette Davis won her a second Academy Award for best actress. Their off-screen collaboration ended Davis’s first marriage.

Wyler, was “the only male strong enough to control me,” Davis wrote in her autobiography. Vintage Hollywood gossip aside, the creative control behind “Jezebel” yielded one of Davis’s least mannered performances and one of Wyler’s most mature films of the ’30s.

Of the cinematic Phillip Marlowes that author Raymond Chandler saw in his lifetime, it was former baby-faced crooner Dick Powell’s turn as the detective in 1944’s “Murder, My Sweet,” not Humphrey Bogart’s, that was Chandler’s favorite. Budget studio RKO signed Powell in the mid-1940s in the hope of rekindling his popularity through a string of inexpensive musicals. But Powell insisted that he be given a dramatic role to start with, and the studio assigned him to director Edward Dmytryk’s 1945 film version of Chandler’s “Farewell, My Lovely.”

Retitled when preview audiences mistook the original title for yet another Dick Powell musical, “Murder, My Sweet” is one of the great detective films of the ’40s. Dmytryk conjures up a dark, clammy, claustrophobic Los Angeles of loony bins, skid row bars, and gambling dens. Powell’s Marlowe personifies Chandler’s particular union of cynicism and self-sacrifice with an ease and assurance that wouldn’t be matched until Elliot Gould played the role in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” nearly 30 years later.

In addition to storied A-list helmers like Stevens and Wyler, and craftsman like Dmytryk, Raoul Walsh (“They Drive by Night”), Ernest B. Schoedsack (“Mighty Joe Young”), and Michael Curtiz (“Flamingo Road”), the current edition of “View From the Vaults” showcases work by less well-known contract directors. “Action in the North Atlantic” (1943) is a sturdy piece of seagoing World War II flagwavery that demonstrates the unassuming skill of Warner Bros. studio workhorse Lloyd Bacon. “Anne of Windy Poplars,” based on L.M. Montgomery’s sequel to “Anne of Green Gables,” has the old-school assembly line Hollywood clarity one would expect from a cutting room graduate director like Jack Hively.

“One of the wonderful things that ‘View From the Vaults’ can do is let us look at our growing collection in terms of connections,” Ms. Morra said.

What these films have in common besides a need to be seen projected to be appreciated fully, is that they are united in the byzantine twists and turns connecting the classic studio past with the corporate copyright ownership present. Their acquisition, Ms. Morra explained, is a tribute to “the many tentacles of the corporate structure of film studios.”

Begun as an independent production arm of a chain of movie theaters, First National Pictures Inc. was taken over by Warner Bros. when the success of “The Jazz Singer” in 1939 gave Jack Warner and family the clout to absorb their competition. When Warner sold out in 1967, the Warner Bros. and First National Pictures Inc. films he owned were part of the deal.

RKO has been defunct as a studio production entity since Howard Hughes ran it into the ground in the late 1950s. After a convoluted few decades of sales and mergers, the RKO film catalog is now, like the Warner Bros. and First National Films catalogs, the property of AOL Time Warner.

Due to decades of confusion, periods of disinterest, and constant changes in ownership, “knowing who owns what [films] these days is a bit like the tradition of storytelling,” Ms. Morra said. But for these 10 pictures, the story has a happy ending. Reborn in new prints and exhibited in MoMA’s newly renovated 53rd Street headquarters, they re-create a lost world of inspired Hollywood professionalism outside the new world realities of corporate ownership.

Through February 24 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).