Obituaries for the movie musical have proven premature. Recent films echo the diversity if not the quantity of the 1940s assembly line, when musicals ranged from prestigious A-list productions to D-list programmers. Most were Hollywood originals, though many had theatrical pedigrees or existed solely to exploit radio and swing stars. Similarly, we now have — in the course of a few years — hulking Broadway adaptations like “Dreamgirls” and “Chicago,” sentimental biopics like “Ray” and “Walk the Line,” hip-hop melodramas like “8 Mile” and “Hustle & Flow,” and occasional oddities, like the underappreciated “Idlewild.”

What we don’t have are movie musical stars. No Astaires, Powells, or Kellys; no Crosbys, Garlands, or Sinatras. Instead, we get actors stretching their way into musicals with stunt doubles for the rigorous dance moves. When bona fide musicians play musicians, it’s in the hope of achieving a success that will secure them straight roles. Does anyone anticipate a series of Jennifer Hudson musicals? The manager of a best-selling recording artist, eager to cross over into Jamie Foxx land, recently explained that he would no longer allow his client to appear in musicals because they would stereotype him.

New DVD releases of a major musical from 1971, “Fiddler on the Roof,” and a minor one from 1943, “Presenting Lily Mars,” show that problems of casting have long befuddled the genre. Norman Jewison’s “Fiddler” reeks of money, ambition, and profundity, though it is hardly an unalloyed success. For those who love the film, the transfer is excellent and most of the now familiar midrash (plus a new feature on orchestrator John Williams) is placed on a second disc — not on the flip side of a single disc, as in the previous DVD edition.

I always approach “Fiddler” with trepidation, in part because it extracts a transitory emotional toll I can neither explain nor transcend; I sob profusely. My more rational ambivalence concerns the score, which is certainly tuneful and apparently immortal, but awfully kitschy when it sacrifices its Middle European harmonies and rhythms for corn-fed Broadway cheeriness — in many respects, the template for “Fiddler” was “Oklahoma.” One example: In the song “Miracle of Miracles,” the melodic phrase for the lyric “God has made a man today” sorely misses the Judaic ingenuity of Gershwin, Kern, Arlen, or even Porter.

What I miss in the film is the irreverence, the surprising hilarity, of the original 1964 Broadway production, as embodied in Zero Mostel’s ability to create the illusion of spontaneity even when each gesture was polished to a shine. There were no tears then. The expulsion from Anatevka was moving, but the entire production radiated the explosive heat of Broadway-meets-Yiddish-theater adrenaline, which did wonders in cutting the syrup. Even the absence of an overture signaled something fresh and nervy.

The shift from brazen comedy to universal pathos probably began when Hershel Bernardi, a veteran of Yiddish theater, took over the part — his niceness became the rule. The movie, in seeking verisimilitude, emphasized the sentiment, privileging history over folklore, cutting down on Chagall’s magic realism in favor of scenes that actually show Red riots in Kiev and a flashback of Tevye’s most rebellious daughter as a small child. “Fiddler” may be the Jewish “Roots,” a tie to the Russian travail, but it was also a paean to the transcendence of Jewish-American entertainment, something absent from the virtually Jew-free Broadway revival with Alfred Molina.

Mr. Jewison’s film works on many levels. Despite the two-minute opening sunrise, its three hours are rarely laborious. Isaac Stern’s splendid fiddling during the opening credits sets a high standard for the score, which John Williams orchestrates forcefully. The cast is mostly excellent, especially Topol, a sly Tevye with a back broad enough to carry the film, excelling at the recitative, and keeping one eye on God and the other on the camera.

The film’s primary failing is in measuring up to the Jerome Robbins choreography — dances are shot waist-up; rather than build to a climax, the “To Life” episode spins into incoherence and then simply stops with a freeze-frame; even the great bottle dance, one of Robbins’s peak achievements, is staged unimaginatively and curtailed. Yet the verisimilitude has its rewards, as do the rhythmic editing by Antony Gibbs and Robert Lawrence and the photography by Oswald Morris, who, like Mr. Jewison, is nothing if not literal-minded. I’m not certain that the antiseptic shtetl they built in Yugoslavia is any more realistic than the stage set built for Broadway’s Imperial Theater in 1964, but the vistas are lovely.

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Making Tevye dramatically authentic was probably an easier call than that facing MGM and a 20-year-old Judy Garland, who in 1943 was beyond an adolescence of capers with Mickey Rooney. She had already appeared in 15 feature films, including an adult role in 1942’s “For Me and My Gal,” when the producer Joseph Pasternak bought Booth Tarkington’s 1933 novel “Presenting Lily Mars” as her next vehicle — the oddest musical in her résumé and consequently a cult film.

Clearly, MGM didn’t see her as a contemporary woman (“For Me and My Gal” is set during World War I). Yet they compromised, bringing the story to the present while deciding that the music should be (extra light) operetta — perfect for Deanna Durbin, then at her peak, but all wrong for the greatest song belter since Al Jolson.

Then someone had another thought: this swing thing that had been going on for a decade. So they added guest appearances by the Bob Crosby and Tommy Dorsey bands. Then someone else, reportedly Louis B. Mayer, complained that the picture looked kind of chintzy, so why not reshoot a grand finale, reviving a good old MGM tune from 1929, “Broadway Melody”? As a result, “Presenting Lily Mars” is three films in one, and as no one likes all three parts, it’s usually dismissed as a dud.

I sing the praises of Part 1, the first 40 minutes, played unexpectedly for laughs, with Judy doing mustache-twirling readings of Lady Macbeth and a refugee from “Way Down East,” as several sibling moppets imitate her every emotion. Van Heflin works on his double takes, Spring Byington fussbudgets, and a weird little girl plays and sings for Lily’s grand entrance — a little girl who would grow up to be the flamehaired jazz singer Annie Ross. Garland never looked better, though she blows the hair off her brow a few times too many.

The next hour is a cliché-packed retake on “42nd Street,” as Judy wins Heflin’s heart and a role in his dreadful stage show featuring her rival, played by the Hungarian operetta star Marta Eggerth, who sings most of the regrettable songs — one of which Garland parodies (a total waste of the Crosby band). Heflin begins to look as though he were earning every penny of his salary, and just when you have surrendered to disbelief, Part 3 comes along in the brief finale — Judy unchained, though forced to dance as much as she sings. A year later, she would get the film she deserved, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” but during the next quarter-century she would not make as many films as she had in the six years before “Presenting Lily Mars.” She, too, had surrendered to verisimilitude.

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