Two modes of gangster film have predominated since the silent era: Thugs at war with the law and thugs at war with one another. The first restage the morality plays of the Old West with spats, machine guns, and electric chair. The second recapitulate Western sentimentality, portraying the urban underworld as a social microcosm, an alternate landscape of proto-capitalists, tragic misfits, and thieves with honor. A culture that resurrects Jesse James as Tyrone Power will venerate the Corleones for having better manners and looks than their enemies. Gangster films liberate themes of loyalty and heroism (and stratagems of warfare and revenge) from the repressive details of logic while guaranteeing shoot-outs, chases, and other kinetic denouements. They are our fairy tales.

The Criterion Collection has now released elaborate DVD restorations of four crime films made between 1949 and 1954, two each by the American director Jules Dassin and the French director Jacques Becker. They reflect a Brechtian (or Langian) immersion in underworld self-sufficiency – the appearance of cops in each suggests an almost comic irrelevancy. Like all good genre films, they restate complicated issues in terms a child can understand.

A filmmaker concerned with themes of loyalty and moral quandary might have looked at the choices facing colleagues asked either to accuse friends of faux-treason or face a blacklist, but that was impossible. So Mr. Dassin, a Communist Party member between 1937 and 1939, was dispatched to London to make what would be his last American film: “Night and the City,” (1950) the stunning character study of a remorseless weasel, an “artist without an art” who discovers his calling in duplicity. He betrays everyone including, after he runs out of dupes, himself. Betrayal is an addiction for Harry Fabian (brilliant portrayed by Richard Widmark); he’s a puppet master intoxicated with pulling strings.

Becker also knew something about treachery and loyalty. A former assistant to Jean Renoir, he served a year in a German POW camp yet managed to direct films during the Occupation, and he might have found his subject in the deadly spying all around him. But that was impossible. So he achieved his creative breakthrough with the incomparable “Casque d’Or,” a romantic tragedy set at the turn of the century, about former inmates who sacrifice themselves for friendship – a theme revisited in his contemporary crime thriller, “Touchez pas au grisbi” (1954).

In discussing these films, each posted with the brand film noir, it may be useful to recall that labels can hide as much as they illuminate. American critics ignored the subtleties of 1950s Westerns by Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and even John Ford because they were Westerns. “Night and the City” may be, as DVD commentator Glenn Erickson convincingly argues, the ultimate example of film noir, but it seems discourteous to pigeonhole so exceptional a work – as if Mr. Dassin, writer Jo Eisinger (working with the title and central character but not the plot of Gerald Kersh’s novel), and cinematographer Max Greene consciously strove to join a fashionable club of postwar despair. “Night and the City,” which was largely dismissed in the United States and London in its initial release, is like no other film.

The picture certainly has its antecedents, not least a Dickensian or Wellesian cast of supporting grotesques. Mr. Dassin surely recalled Orson Welles racing through the sewers in Carol Reed’s “The Third Man,” but he prefigures Welles’s “Mr. Arkadin” with his close-up gargoyles and insistence that character is fate. Fabian has no back-story and no connection to any other world beyond the rat maze in which he spins his wheels. Everyone in this film is a manipulator, though most speak like conservative merchants, and no one gets what he or she wants – not even the coiled crimeboss (swarthy, glassy-eyed Herbert Lom) who nonetheless walks away unmolested by the hapless police.

Nor does the film look like any other. Shot on location in London, Mr. Dassin turned the city into a soundstage, going so far as to include a drive through Trafalgar Square in which crowds gawk at the camera evidently mounted on the car. Those crowds become de facto members of the sucker class, perpetual outsiders to the men (criminals or filmmakers) going about their insulated business.

Except for a few grainy day shots, the film stock seems to glisten, exteriors and interiors alike fashioned into patterns of pitch and light. In the nightclub office, Phil (the truly Dickensian Francis L. Sullivan, thrust into 20th-century chicanery) hovers on one side, his back to the camera, while a parallel space discloses Fabian’s girlfriend (a miscast Gene Tierney); the screen is thus broken into Mondrianesque squares, parts of the maze in which they are stuck. When Harry sidles up to a bar lit by candles, the light shines in his eyes, on his tie and carnation and wrist, all made opalescent in contrast to swatches of absolute blackness. Mr. Dassin stylized every shot, always with thematic purpose. Before the desperate Helen (implacable Googie Withers) kisses Fabian, dragon smoke issues from her nostrils.

Widmark’s coiled energy turns boyish when released, and sullen or hysterical when opposed. His pas de deux with Helen is perfectly gauged – each certain that the other is buying a bill of goods (he’s right) – as is his lost meditation in the riverside shack of Anna (Maureen Delaney, warming him up for a similar set and character in “Pickup on South Street”).One of his most alluring moments is primarily visual. Thinking he has it made, he hurdles a stair railing into Phil’s club, affecting a Chaplinesque stance, his feet splayed (the light picking up what appear to be white spats) and arms outstretched, before beating out his briefly enjoyed elation in a drum solo.

One of the DVD’s supplements argues for the validity of a different cut of “Night and the City” released in England with an understated score and alternative scenes. Criterion elected not to include that version in deference to Mr. Dassin, who, at 93, is said to abominate it. One can understand him objecting to its risibly romantic conclusion, but the British score by Benjamin Frankel seems superior to the once by Franz Waxman, which telegraphs every emotion – something producer Daryl Zanuck often mandated.

“Thieves’ Highway” is a misfire, albeit a fascinating one that plays better on second viewings, when you are prepared for the utter idiocy of the hero, played by Richard Conte. Here, for a change, there is no score beyond the credits, and the natural sounds of location shooting in the groves and markets worked by truckers hauling fruit intensifies many scenes. Conte is a Greek son home from the sea, out to avenge his father, who was robbed and crippled by Lee J. Cobb’s ruthless wholesaler. But Conte proves more Candide than Odysseus, instantly diverted by Valentina Cortese’s whore with a heart of you-know-what.

“You look like chipped glass,” he tells her. “Took me a long time to get that way,” she says. Yes, and it took many men to name Shanghai Lily.

When the film sticks to corruption, betrayal, and revenge, it stays on target. But there is more than a touch of sadism running through it, especially at the conclusion of a spectacular truck crash, when two pointless inserts underscore the fact that the driver is burned alive. When Conte falls for Cortese, the movie is not about to force him to choose between her and his fiancee, so presto change-o his fiancee turns into a rabid gold-digger – this while Cortese (who provides the character an earthiness the script strenuously tries to undermine) takes a symbolic shower, from which she emerges with the best line: “Aren’t women wonderful?”

Although, Becker’s “Casque d’Or” was initially panned in France, it soon earned an international reputation as a lapidary masterpiece, and remains agelessly and compulsively absorbing, taking its energy from one of the cinema’s great star turns. Simone Signoret, whose blond hair is the title’s “helmet of gold,” has few lines, but her all-purpose smile and hypnotic eyes would make any more superfluous. A guillotine sequence suggests Camus in its brutal efficiency, and the film never softens or romanticizes the killers and thieves of la belle epoque beyond extreme male bonding. Yet there is a lyricism at the core, beyond the painterly evocations of lakeside picnics and lovemaking.

This is no less true of “Touchez pas au grisbi,” a contemporary saga of underworld rivalry that takes place after a heist – for once, the heist is of no consequence, only the titular imperative, “Don’t touch the loot.” (Mr. Dassin’s heist classic, “Rififi,” which reestablished him as a filmmaker, debuted in France months later.) The pacing is as confident and disarmingly easy as Jean Gabin’s masterly performance or the persistently reiterated harmonica tune, which augurs musical scores by Ennio Morricone and the specific melody of “The Godfather.” Maybe Becker’s films are more human and balanced because of their easiness with sex. Casual couplings, whatever complications may ensue, give the characters and milieu a timeless credibility, a feeling of life lived. In the absence of sexual release, the gangsters and settings of Mr. Dassin’s films grow gnarled with frustration and brutality – even the stylishness is stark and ominous. “Night and the City” never stops moving. “Touchez pas au grisbi” makes time for wine and pate.

Mr. Giddins’s column appears alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.