William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur” (1959) and Nicolas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (1976) are oddly companionable. Both are based on novels that track the struggles of aliens – fish out of water, strangers in a strange land, messiahs – treated badly by the natives but triumphant in the long run. Both are protracted, self-important, and wearying, yet remain, in their best moments, visually and aurally sumptuous. These films now have something else in common: They are redeemed as exemplary DVDs, which fail to make them better movies but do underscore and amplify their worthy fascination.

This isn’t just a matter of the tails – documentaries, interviews, commentaries – wagging the dogs, which have never been more brightly spruced. DVDs allow, encourage, and demand skill at fast-forwarding; they prompt you to watch episodic films episodically. Watching “Ben-Hur” all at once is like sitting down to a 10-course meal and finding that every course consists of potato dumplings, except for the seventh, which is strawberry shortcake (that would be the chariot race). Segmented viewings of “The Man Who Fell to Earth” counter its stubborn lack of dramatic thrust. The profuse extras reconstruct the deconstructed films so that the viewer, who may once have dismissed them as kitsch, can now participate in the adventure of creating kitsch.

The DVD producers indicate what we are to make of such time capsules by the selection of midrash. The talking heads – a cast of thousands – assembled to praise “Ben-Hur” speak almost exclusively about the making of the film; Mr. Roeg and his collaborators are concerned almost as exclusively with themes, characters, and ideas. But they’ve got it reversed. “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” attempting to mean everything, means nothing but glimmers with technique: superb camera work, dazzling editing, bravura performances, the annihilation of chronological time – a Roeg specialty, more effectively used in his follow-up, “Bad Timing” (1980).”Ben-Hur,” for all its logistic marvels, works as a useful road map to the evasions of the 1950s – a Rosetta stone marking the beginning of the end of Hollywood piety and a fond farewell to 19th-century melodrama.

Criterion’s recent DVD of “Boudou Saved From Drowning” includes an old television interview with its director, Jean Renoir, offering a quaint moment of illumination. Renoir is explaining that he used a certain lens to bring Paris locations into the story, yet he apologizes two or three times for bringing up a vulgar detail of technique. Technique, after all, is his problem, not that of the viewer, whose sole concern ought to be characters and narrative.

Now we are all authorities on computer effects, matte paintings, divisions of labor, and every other aspect of what goes on behind the scenes. The storyteller has been usurped by the manner of his telling. “Ben-Hur,” though praised in terms – “the thinking man’s epic,” “one of the 10 best films of all time,” “profound dialogue” – that might make anyone feel like an alien, is, in fact, venerated for its colossal accumulation of backstage anecdotes and its influence on contemporary films that, even in the realm of junk, occupy a far lower order: “Gladiator,” “Revenge of the Sith,” “War of the Worlds.” Still, gossip is irresistible. Much is made of Wyler’s decision to shoot Jesus from the rear, but the DVD’s inclusion of Fred Niblo’s superior, shorter, more faithful 1925 silent film shows that he went Wyler several limbs better, showing only Jesus’s arm; Niblo even positioned an enormous kneeling extra to hide Jesus’s face at the last supper. Gore Vidal’s claims of authorship are undermined by early screen tests and comments from Wyler and Charlton Heston.

The 1959 film is less a tale of the Christ than a spectacle cleverly navigating the political minefields of the day. Its themes include the threatened extinction of the Jews, the value of passive resistance, the evils of informing, and Jewish-Arab solidarity. Hollywood liberalism meets Christian conservatism without rustling anyone’s feathers, an achievement more awesome than racing chariots, battling pirates, and vanishing leprosy. Messala might be lecturing Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront” when he says, “Telling the names of criminals is hardly informing,” except that Messala is evil and Ben-Hur doesn’t buy it.

All these themes are in the Lew Wallace novel, but are tweaked for modern customers, as is Ben-Hur’s refusal to join the Jews for Jesus movement. He’s grateful that his family no longer has leprosy, but we leave him kissing his Mezuzah. Also absent is any hint of debauchery – gone are the topless petal-strewing gals of the 1925 film, gone is the treacherous Iras, who kills Messala in the novel and vamps mightily in the silent film. Instead we have chasteness and violence, a lesson not lost on Mel Gibson.

The shooting star that announces the savior’s birth in “Ben-Hur” prefigures the hurtling vehicle that brings David Bowie to ground in “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” The films also share an emphasis on water and thirst. While Ben-Hur is undeterred from his mission by a love of horses and vengeance, Mr. Bowie’s Thomas Newton is sidelined by an affection for gin, sex, and television – but reading into this an indictment of modern values is like reading into “Ben-Hur” a parable of sacred devotion.

The themes are vast, general, and elastic, adding up to a justification for filmmaking zeal. “America is so beautiful,” Newton observes, and the New Mexico desert shot by Mr. Roeg fits the bill. It also sounds good, with a score that includes Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and, in a climactic burst of inspiration, Artie Shaw’s “Star Dust” – though the power of the latter compensates for the diminishment of power as the script goes hurtling into a no-man’s land of the inexplicable. Oddly enough, the film is devoid of drugs and 1970s rock – but as a warning against demon gin, Carry Nation could not have said it better.

Mr. Roeg, as always, piles on the symbols and the sex – so scrupulously that as Candy Clark’s character ages, her midsection and pubic hair are made up to reflect the change in life. As for the symbols, we learn from an interview with screenwriter Paul Mayersberg that the mysterious figure who watches Newton fall is supposed to represent the author of the piece, which could mean Mr. Roeg or novelist Walter Tevis. Has anyone else ever come to that conclusion? And has anyone ever recognized Newton’s gazing on a dock as an homage to Gatsby, who he in no way resembles? Noting that critics thought the film made Ms. Clark’s character out to be anti-feminist, Mr. Mayersberg says, “She’s living with an alien, for Christ’s sake. That beats most women’s lives, doesn’t it?”

Mr. Roeg and his writers toss in poems, paintings, names, book jackets, photos, and anything else that might amplify one theme or another, while ignoring characterization and plot. Why doesn’t Newton take off in his rocket? Why is his lawyer thrown out a window? Who are the bad guys? Why are we watching excerpts from “Love in the Afternoon” and “Billy Budd”? Don’t ask and they won’t tell.

What makes “The Man Who Fell to Earth” an unusual DVD is its determination to make a case for the source material as well as the film. The package includes the 160-page novel, plus an audio interview with Tevis (who never mentions the film), with the result that the rational, dramatic novel has all the qualities the film lacks, and none of the film’s virtues: explosions of sight, sound, and emotion beyond the ken of the writer. The two add up to a more effective work than either one alone.

Mr. Giddins’s column appears every other Tuesday.