After the Second World War, Hollywood – on the verge of losing its theaters to antitrust laws and its audience to television – fought to maintain its ground with colossal spectacles, three-dimensional photography, wraparound screens, stereophonic sound, and increasing doses of sex and violence. But those were faddish diversions. The real change was more fundamental and lasting: The new Hollywood aimed for realism, which meant venturing beyond the studio gates. Westerns had long captured genuine skies and terrains; why couldn’t city stories be shot on the mean streets? With the increasing mobility of cameras, helicopters replaced cranes, and with the increasing naturalism of color photography, three-strip Technicolor had no more of a future than black and white.

Alas, every advance signals a retreat.

Location shooting liberated the cinema, but at the cost of an ingenious and inimitable artificiality. Those who never saw a movie on a pre-multiplex screen are unlikely to get the chance. But DVD restorations can at least offer a taste of classic cinematography, where the camera doesn’t merely record the action, but adds a sensory, even erotic component. I refer to two kinds of restorations: movies that are genuinely, digitally restored, frame by frame; and movies restored to audiences, after decades of legal constraints, in sharply focused prints that may have scratches but are not trashed by the faded tones and butcher-block splices of late night broadcasts.

I confine myself here mostly to Hollywood films now given face-lifts or making their debuts on DVD – and to black-and-white this week, Technicolor next time. One exception that ranks among the year’s indispensable releases is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 masterpiece, “The Wages of Fear,” long a highlight – first on laser, then on DVD – in the Criterion Collection.

The earlier editions, which restored 50 or so minutes that had been hacked away for its 1955 American release, seemed perfectly acceptable. Compared to the new, comprehensively spruced-up digital transfer, they are barely watchable. Made in an area of France that doubled for a South American hellhole, this is a film shot through (by Armand Thirard) with extreme blacks and whites, penetrating sunlight and suffocating mud. The images glow with immediacy and an almost vertiginous precision – utterly displacing the worn-out grays of the previous incarnation.

“The Wages of Fear” is a candidate for best adventure film ever made. “The Seven Samurai” is richer in display and action, but doesn’t compare in the arena of grueling suspense. Clouzot’s film made an actor of Yves Montand, gave Charles Vanel his career pinnacle, and captured the too-in frequently sighted Vera Clouzot in her most enchantingly sexy role. The deceptively sleepy beginning is prelude to a churning ride, in trucks without shock absorbers, as desperate men attempt to transport nitro to an American oil field. The direction, photography, acting, and script (co-authored by Clouzot and Jerome Geronimi, and abundant with subtle sidesteps) never falter. Criterion added a second disc of extras, but the print quality in itself is enough to mandate an upgrade.

No less rewarding and perhaps even more unexpected is Kino’s glistening release of Fritz Lang’s 1945 “Scarlet Street,” a film that seemed to have fallen into a permanent purgatory of public-domain cheapies. Kino found a near pristine print in the Library of Congress. This was Lang’s follow-up to “The Woman in the Window,” both built around an impulsive murder committed by milquetoast Edward G. Robinson, caught in the web of Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea. Robinson recalled both films as evidence of Lang’s decline, and characterized “Scarlet Street” and his work in it as “monotonous.”

In fact, his worm-that-turns rates among his powerful and witting performances, matched every step by Duryea’s oily pimp (his catchphrase is, “for cat’s sake”) and Bennett’s luminous, cellophane-wrapped streetwalker who tells Robinson, “You are clever,” when he guesses that she’s an actress. One of Lang’s American triumphs, “Scarlet Street” exemplifies his fastidious control in a studio setting, fashioning – with photographer Milton Krasner – a sordid stand-in for Greenwich Village, painting nights with inky blackness and harsh reflections. A matchless study of male midlife crisis and desperation born of missed opportunities, “Scarlet Street” also packs a nasty yet droll rabbit punch on the subject of art and authorship.

Kino has also rescued from oblivion Lang’s 1949 “House by the River,” a relatively minor film made for Republic on a reduced budget. Shallow pockets are reflected in the cast led by Louis Hayward, who telegraphs his treachery with mustache-twirling glee, even if he is clean-shaven. The opening is very fine: A pleasant day by a scenic but contaminated river, as a struggling novelist wrestles with words and dispenses neighborly comfort to an elderly woman. Within minutes, he attempts rape and kills the maid (whom Lang mischievously allows us to glimpse in her bath), an emblematic instance of Langian chance gone awry. This film lacks his best punch and tempo, but has enough visual jolts to keep it afloat.

“Lifeboat” is similarly regarded as second-drawer Hitchcock, but the new DVD from 20th Century Fox may generate a healthier evaluation. In faded television prints, this film always seemed to me terminally talky – too much of it patriotic pep talk. Also, having Tallulah Bankhead and Henry Hull in the same picture breaks the bank for throaty self-importance. The 1944 film is set entirely in a lifeboat, which is to say a studio tank, making the effort something of a benchmark in creative camerawork; it may suffer from morale building, but not from claustrophobia or visual stasis.

Its authorship was turned into a shell game, with John Steinbeck sharing the title card with Hitchcock, Jo Swerling getting the screenplay credit. In fact, Hitchcock conceived the original story; Steinbeck, at his request, wrote a novella; and any number of hands massaged the script. Though initially admired, “Lifeboat” failed after the Times’s Bosley Crowther declared it propaganda for the Nazis, and a chastened Daryl Zanuck withdrew studio support.

Maybe you had to be there. The Nazi thing is incomprehensible – if ever there was a detestable villain it is Nazi Walter Slezak sending William Bendix to sleep with the fishes. Fox’s “Special Edition,” representing the last Hitchcock feature to get a serious DVD presentation, complete with commentary and short talking-heads featurette, restores the one thing that makes the talk acceptable and even compelling: the sensuousness of the photography, which accentuates the resourcefulness of Hitchcock’s camera placements and the rhythmic cutting. When a film looks and sounds this good, it commands new respect or at least a second chance.

That much can even be said for “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers,” Lewis Milestone’s 1946 gothic noir, long available in tolerable home video releases, though never one as sharp as this one, unearthed by Paramount for a no-frills release in what it laughably calls its “full screen collection.” The story, which begins with a 15-minute exposition of a childhood secret and leaps ahead to the present time, reeks of overstuffed 1940s novels, but was actually written for the screen by Robert Rossen. It shares a similar morality with the Lang films – guilt will ultimately expunge evil – but also has a truculent postwar attitude summed up by Van Heflin’s avowal, “I don’t like anybody to get pushed around.” The material clearly energized Milestone, who comes up with a slew of bravura shots, abetted by Paramount’s veteran cameraman Victor Milner (a favorite of Lubitsch and Sturges); the camera is rarely still, the lighting rarely mundane.

Barbara Stanwyck, whose starry entrance comes 30 minutes into the film, plays a soul mate to her fatal femme in the superior “Double Indemnity” (1944), going so far as to die the same death. Kirk Douglas, in his film debut, wear glasses as a sexually deprived, perfidious alcoholic, and Lizabeth Scott, out of her league, does her best with the poorly written role of a woman of dubious provenance. The reason to see the film is Heflin, a stage actor who brought idiosyncratic realism to Hollywood when stimulated, but otherwise painted by the numbers. He was never better than as Martha’s strange love, doing a neat knuckle-rolling coin trick, bedding both women on the same day (how did that get past the censors?), and making heavy-breathing melodrama a lot more appealing than it has any right to be.

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