Anyone impervious to the mild but genuine pleasures of “Sadie McKee” (1934), the earliest of five movies collected in “The Joan Crawford Collection, Volume 2,” out today from Warner Bros., is probably immune to the genius-of-the-system artisanship that buttressed old Hollywood. Not being immune myself, I respond like Louis B. Mayer’s dog, synapses cued to every calculated stimulus,
as Sadie works her way through three loves and a four-chamber roundelay of the classes: old money, underclass chicanery, nouveau riche, and — in the words of the bilious plutocrat who is the last man standing — “honest working girl.”

“Sadie McKee” is, in the jargon of its day, absolute hooey, but it is the hooey of master craftspeople, working together like apprentices in a Renaissance studio, each one a specialist in light or fabric or hands or eyes, held in balance by the master’s supervision. In this instance, the master was director Clarence Brown, who guided Crawford’s renovation from the flapper of silent pictures to the talkies’ perennial Cinderella. His second-in-command, Oliver T. Marsh, photographed a dozen Crawford vehicles through the 1930s (three with Brown as director), never more lovingly than in “Sadie McKee.” They accentuated each angle of her picture-perfect face, all eyes and mouth, making it gleam like well-polished silverware.

Lying in bed and listening to her unstable boyfriend, Tommy (Gene Raymond), sing “All I Do is Dream of You,” Crawford gets a 17-second close-up, as if the camera got lost in its gaze. Elsewhere, the camera has plenty of distractions — including delectable bits by Jean Dixon, who says of Tommy’s singing, “With a voice like that he’s sure to sit on his own lap.” Akim Tamiroff giggles about a $1,000 tip, and Ethel Griffies mimes spinster outrage as a curious subway rider. There are almost enough songs to qualify the film as a musical, including an “After You’ve Gone” rendered by the 1920s crooner Gene Austin.

Tiny in life, Crawford was magnified by the camera to colossal and eventually monstrous dimensions. The monstrous years are touched on at the end of this quintuple feature, with Charles Walters’s unforgivably entertaining “Torch Song” (1953), by which time Crawford’s lipstick no longer followed the contours of her lips and her characters no longer followed the rules of humble humanity. If self-parody became her, “Sadie McKee” is a reminder that there was something worth parodying — something intrepid, insubordinate, and incorruptible.

If one theme unites all five films, it is that Crawford’s characters not only learn to do the right thing, but help others to do it as well, except for those who are completely irredeemable, whom she has no choice but to kill. Crawford had few if any rivals in the realm of justifiable homicide. She kills Torsten Barring (the wondrously slimy Conrad Veidt) in George Cukor’s “A Woman’s Face” (1941) when she realizes, rather late in the game, that she would rather not help him murder a child who stands between him and an inheritance. She also offs Sheriff Titus Semple (the wonderfully megalomaniacal Sidney Greenstreet) in Michael Curtiz’s “Flamingo Road” (1949, and based on a trenchant 1942 Robert Wilder novel that merits resurrection) because it makes things easier all around. She serves a little time, but Melvin Douglas’s rich doctor or David Brian’s rich political boss will be waiting.

In “Torch Song,” the road to love requires the humiliation of her beloved, a blind pianist and war hero (Michael Wilding) who is beating the hell out of “Tenderly” when she stealthily appears in his living room, like a mantis about to bite the head off its mate. Crumpled by her derision, he does right by conceding his love for her. In “Sadie McKee,” do-gooding is rampant. She gets Tommy, who abandoned her on her wedding day in favor of a blond chanteuse (Esther Ralston, singing hilariously, if unintentionally, off-key), to see the light on his tubercular deathbed. She had already cured the alcoholism of her insanely understanding millionaire husband (Edward Arnold) and brought to heel the plutocrat (Franchot Tone) who will be husband no. 2. That’s how it was in the Depression: so many millionaires competing for a shortage of working girls.

Which leaves the set’s unsavory stowaway — there’s one in every box — “Strange Cargo” (1940), directed with less than a full measure of attention by Frank Borzage in the same year he made his romantic wartime masterpiece “The Mortal Storm.” Set on Devil’s Island, it tracks the escape of several remorseless killers, including one played by Clark Gable, who emerges from 30 days in the hole with his hair rakishly brushed and stubble trimmed. They are accompanied by a dance hall entertainer of unspecified talents, played by Crawford, and God, played by Ian Hunter.

This film is always referred to as an allegory, which might hold water if Hunter’s character were a symbol of or stand-in for God or Jesus; but he isn’t — he is the Unmoved Mover himself, or a close associate with the same powers, including universal predestination. Unsurprisingly, the Catholic Legion of Decency was less forgiving than the Gable-Crawford fans (this was their eighth and final film together) or the Borzage explicators. The Legion demanded a few alterations and settled for a harrumph.

Why God intervenes in a penal colony when He could be doing so much more at, say, Auschwitz, which also opened the same year, is a mystery, but not a compelling one. The only true allegorical touch is that He fails to convert the German prisoner — Germans are beyond even His powers. I don’t think we are meant to read anything into the fact that two convicts are named after French novelists: Flaubert and Verne. Still, it fits in with the theme of the other films. Gable’s Verne not only does right, finding God as his Blackie did a few years earlier in “San Francisco,” but turns himself in, confident that when he is released, Crawford, also converted, will be waiting — an honest working girl.

Except for a smooch between the stars, not much fun is had in “Strange Cargo,” but the other films in this set are filled with bonbons generated by Crawford. In a 1938 letter to Gerald Murphy, F. Scott Fitzgerald memorably described the difficulty of writing for her: “She can’t change her motions in the middle of a scene without going through a sort of Jekyll and Hyde contortion of the face, so that when one wants to indicate that she is going from joy to sorrow, one must cut away and then cut back. Also, you can never give her such a stage direction as ‘telling a lie,’ because if you did, she would practically give a representation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the British.”

Indeed, there are moments when Crawford doesn’t frown, but puts on a frown, and doesn’t pout, but puts on a pout. Hearing a rumble of thunder at the beginning of “Flamingo Road,” she looks as though the weather had it in for her personally. Yet she is almost always absorbing — the bad acting has a disarming way of opening up the process of filmmaking. And quite often, the acting isn’t bad; sometimes it’s luminous. Crawford is genuinely alert to other actors, something Cukor made the most of with his extended two-shots of her and Douglas, and her and Veidt. She is also very handy with props. In “Torch Song,” she does five minutes of mime, alone on a Sunday morning trying to imagine herself blind.

Of course, that’s the film in which she also does one of the most pointless and inept blackface numbers of all time, “Two-Faced Woman,” wearing what Debbie Reynolds once described (in “That’s Entertainment”) as “tropical makeup.” What were they thinking — outlandishness as a substitute for youth? No one seems to know. Yet the next year, Crawford made the witch-hunt Western “Johnny Guitar.” Not long after that, we would learn what ever happened to Blanche Hudson.

Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”