This week, the most interesting DVD to appear on release lists is:

“The Bing Crosby Collection”

Although Bing Crosby is best known for the “Road …” pictures with Bob Hope and his Oscar winning performance in “Going My Way,” the crooner turned actor racked up a considerable resume of big-screen appearances.

Six of his lesser known and hard to find movies are collected on “The Bing Crosby Collection,” which will be released on DVD Tuesday. Though there are still many Crosby starring roles still locked away in studio vaults, this half-dozen comes from a productive run of films he made from 1933-48. Ever the crooner, the movies feature Crosby singing signature tunes such as “June in January,” “Swanee River” and “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams.”

Briefly, here’s the roster:

“College Humor” (1933) – Crosby is a college professor who vies with a football star for the favors of a lovely co-ed. George Burns and Gracie Allen provide comic relief.

“We’re Not Dressing” (1934) – Presaging “Gilligan’s Island,” Crosby plays a deckhand on a shipwrecked yacht whose passengers include the wacky heiress Carole Lombard and island locals Burns and Allen.

“Here Is My Heart” (1934) – Crosby is a successful radio crooner who poses as a hotel waiter to get close to an icy Russian princess (Kitty Carlisle) who possesses a coveted antique.

“Mississippi” (1935) – As a cowardly, disgraced gentleman, Crosby travels to the Old South for a singing job on a riverboat. There he meets a crusty old captain (W.C. Fields), who teaches him about courage and honor.

“Sing You Sinners” (1938) – In a rare drama, Crosby joins with Fred MacMurray and Donald O’Connor as singing brothers who seek their fortune in L.A. and find themselves mixed up in a dangerous racetrack gambling scandal.

“Welcome Stranger” (1947) – Crosby reunites with Barry Fitzgerald (“Going My Way”) in this musical comedy in which an impetuous young doctor clashes with a crotchety old physician over how to run a small-town medical practice.

Though hardly representing Crosby at his best, these movies do demonstrate the range of work he attempted and a hard-nosed effort to turn himself from popular crooner to major movie star.

“The Bing Crosby Collection” is not rated. It runs about 500 minutes on six discs and is being released by Universal Studios.

- Dennis King

In the opening piece of his wonderful new book of essays, “Warning Shadows,” critic Gary Giddins delivers a riveting master class on the history of movies, their rapid evolution and their potent influence on popular culture.

Giddins, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for “Visions of Jazz” and author of “Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams,” is a highly regarded, award-winning jazz critic, cultural writer and biographer who now turns his sights on classic films recently released on DVD and illuminates them anew with deft analysis, acute insight and stylish prose.

“Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema” (W.W. Norton & Company, $18.95) begins with a comprehensive essay on the way we watch “moving pictures” – from the early nickelodeons and works from Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio to the Hollywood studio era with its opulent movie palaces to the advent of home video technologies and on-line streaming video.

All through history, movie going has been constantly changed by rapidly developing technologies (sound, color, widescreen, 3-D, digitalization). Other cultural factors, such as censorship and the Production Code and the rivalry of radio, television and the internet, have also profoundly altered the way we view movies and integrate them into our lives.

Particularly startling, Giddins notes, is the way home video has changed movies from communal experiences to intensely private activities. Laughter and tears, the common language of movies, now occur in the confines of the living room instead of the open arena of a theater auditorium.

After setting the stage with this concise and eye-opening introduction, Giddins launches into a wide-ranging examination of cinema, taking in some well-worn classics and some overlooked gems. His precise eye falls on the work of such great directors as Ernst Lubitsch, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa and such workhorse stars as Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and James Stewart, finding new aspects of their movies to examine with relaxed wit and piercing perception.

In some 70 pithy essays – ranging from horror to film noir, from biopics to musicals, from animation to literary adaptations – the author manages to discover quirks and revealing magic that render even familiar old chestnuts fresh and surprising. A perusal of essay titles (drawn from his DVD columns in the New York Sun and the DGA Quarterly) reveals Giddins’ scope: “Joan Crawford Is Dangerous,” “God Is in the House, Maybe” (Ingmar Bergman), “Prestige and Pretense” (“Pride and Prejudice”), “Houdini Escapes! From the Vaults! Of the Past!”

The great French director Bertrand Tavernier recognizes the value of Giddins’ perspective and notes that he “never recycles clichés, he questions the clans and the cliques, and he writes very well of actors and actresses.”

Giddins clearly is a master essayist as well as an astute critic and enthusiastic movie lover. Reading his words is a pleasure, and his far-reaching essays are sure to be a joy for any cinematic fellow traveler. But his sharply erudite opening essay alone is worth the price of the book.

- Dennis King

Long before meta-fiction became a hot literary fad, long before self-referential jokiness and breaking down the fourth wall became hip, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby were cutting up and wink-winking at movie audiences in a zestfully cornball series of road pictures that were box-office gold in the 1940s and ’50s.

All told, the ski-nosed Hope and the satin-voiced Crosby starred in seven “Road to …” movies from 1940 to 1962, and beginning Thursday five of them will be aired over the Turner Classic Movies cable network in a special “On the Road” film event.

The black-and-white films – “Road to Singapore,” “Road to Zanzibar,” “Road to Morocco,” “The Road to Utopia” and “Road to Bali” – will be shown back-to-back Thursday evening into Friday morning and will be re-aired individually in February and March. The two not included in the program are “Road to Rio” (1947) and “Road to Hong Kong” (1962).

Although the actors were said to be bitter rivals off-screen and reveled in scoring snarky digs at each other, Hope and Crosby conjured up an easy-going on-screen chemistry that convinced audiences they were bosom buddies through thick and thin.

Throughout the series, plots were merely thin contrivances that allowed the duo to indulge in loosey-goosey improvisation, banter through loads of inside Hollywood gags, croon their way through a pop songbook of very good to so-so tunes by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen and compete for the sexy charms of their perennially underappreciated though well-endowed co-star Dorothy Lamour.

By today’s standards, the films rank as pretty corny stuff. But Hope and Crosby were masters at vaudeville-style banter, and their spoofing of action-movie conventions and their meta-cinematic asides in which they spoke directly to the camera, delivering digs at Paramount and all manner of sacred Hollywood cows, produced a kind of devil-may-care sass that audiences loved.

Subsequent biographies and interviews have revealed though that most of the “ad-libs” that the duo spun out so effortlessly were in fact lines carefully written by a gaggle of radio gag writers employed by each man. But those were the days of studio supremacy, when carefully cultivated public images were the norm and tawdry truth was routinely suppressed.

Nevertheless, the Road pictures are indeed priceless relics of a simpler time and place, and if you can tolerate two supreme Hollywood egos thrusting and parrying with oh-so-glib one-liners and smug insouciance, this TCM fest is worth a look.

The schedule is:

“Road to Singapore” (1940), 7 p.m., Thurs., repeating  1 p.m., March 11 –  A runaway tycoon and his sailor buddy try to con their way through the South Seas.

“Road to Zanzibar (1941), 8:30 p.m., Thurs., repeating 9:15 a.m., March 14 – A lady con artist scams two out-of-work entertainers into financing a safari.

“Road to Morocco” (1942), 10:15 p.m., Thurs., repeating 1 p.m., Feb. 28 – Two castaways get mixed up in an Arabian nightmare when they’re caught between a bandit and a beautiful princess.

“Road to Utopia (1946), 11:45 p.m., Thurs., repeating 2:30 p.m., Feb. 28 – Two song-and-dance men on the run masquerade as killers during the Alaskan gold rush.

“Road to Bali (1952), 1:30 a.m., Fri. – Two song-and-dance men on the run dive for treasure while competing for a beautiful princess.

Around 1977, there were tentative plans for an eighth Road movie, to be titled “Road to the Fountain of Youth.” But Crosby died that year of a heart attack. Even so, rumors persisted that Hope might team with Red Skelton or George Burns to continue the franchise, but nothing ever came of that.

– Dennis King