Over at Warner Brothers the studio’s most popular hoodlum, James Cagney, went to work for J. Edgar Hoover in William Keighley’s “ ‘G’-Men” — though he still got to handle a Gat — while Hoover granted his personal endorsement of the MGM shorts. Produced by Jack Chertok, who also supervised the studio’s “Our Gang” comedies, the “Crime Does Not Pay” films took around 20 minutes each to tell complete stories of transgression, capture and swift punishment.  For Depression-era filmgoers, presumably besotted with bank-robbing rebels like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson, the shorts were designed to demonstrate the futility of individualized wealth redistribution programs, particularly in the face of modern crime-fighting methods that involved fingerprints and fiber analysis. The films are awash with uniformed authority figures, some wearing the policeman’s blue tunic, others the scientist’s white lab coat.  The series yielded some 50 films until it was discontinued in 1947, and now the complete run has been gathered into a six-disc set by the Warner Archive Collection. It makes for addictive viewing, both as social history and as a proving ground for some of the studio’s up-and-coming talent. The first episode, “Buried Loot,” features an uncredited Robert Taylor in what amounted to his first leading role for MGM — as an improbably handsome embezzler who disfigures himself in a (futile) attempt to hide his identity — and young contract players like Laraine Day, Cameron Mitchell and Van Johnson turn up with regularity.  But it is as a showcase for directors on the way up — and a few on the way down — that “Crime Does Not Pay” is most intriguing. The series’ most famous alumnus is probably Fred Zinnemann, who would go on to win Oscars for “From Here to Eternity” (1953) and “A Man for All Seasons” (1966). Zinnemann honed his detached, documentarylike style with shorts like “Help Wanted” (1939), starring Tom Neal as a temporary laborer who helps bring down a mob-sponsored employment racket, and impressed Chertok so much that he produced Zinnemann’s first feature, “Kid Glove Killer” (1942), a crime thriller with Van Heflin as a scientific investigator very much in the “Crime” style.  The great stylist Jacques Tourneur (“Out of the Past”) completed only one title for the series, “Think It Over” (1938), a characteristically underplayed piece that featured the usually overwrought Dwight Frye (Renfield in Tod Browning’s 1930 “Dracula”) as an arsonist who proves to be too good at his job. A second “Crime” assignment so impressed Louis B. Meyer that he asked Tourneur to add 30 more minutes to it, and the result, “They All Come Out” (1939), was released as Tourneur’s first American feature.  The series also provided opportunities for less ambitious, more workmanlike directors to demonstrate their speed and thriftiness. There is much work here by Joseph M. Newman, who would go on to create a number of well-executed, if not deeply personal, genre pieces in the ’50s and ’60s (including “This Island Earth”). And Felix Feist parlayed his “Crime Does Not Pay” experience into a handful of efficient thrillers, including “The Devil Thumbs a Ride” (1947).  Perhaps the filmmaker most attuned to the “Crime Does Not Pay” aesthetic was the darkly driven Edward L. Cahn, who had created a series of devastatingly pessimistic crime thrillers at Universal in the early ’30s (his masterpiece remains the crushingly cynical 1932 “Afraid to Talk”) before inexplicably turning up at the shorts department at MGM. Working for Chertok, Cahn developed the almost preposterous proficiency that would later allow him to turn out 10 or 12 low-budget features a year. At MGM he alternated “Our Gang” comedies (despite his conspicuous lack of any identifiable sense of humor) with “Crime” shorts that seem every bit as misanthropic and embittered as his Universal features.  The standout among the Cahn shorts is the relentlessly grim “Hit-and-Run Driver” (1935), which actually manages to generate sympathy for its weak protagonist (the forgotten George Walcott, as a driver who plows into a young couple on a deserted turnpike and drives off ignoring their cries for help) by detailing the mechanical efficiency and calculated cruelty of the forces of law and order arraigned against him. Individual heartlessness is one thing, but the institutional variety, Cahn suggests, is far worse — a theme he returned to in his final “Crime Does Not Pay” short, and one of the most forceful in the series, the 1943 “Plan for Destruction,” a 22-minute dramatization of the Nazis’ rise to power as plotted by the academic Karl Haushofer (Frank Reicher). Crime, indeed, but on a dramatically different scale.  By the end of the war the monolithic moral certainty and blind faith in authority that defined “Crime Does Not Pay” in its initial episodes had begun to decay, and the last few films find the series drifting into the ambivalence and unease of film noir. In 1945 a successful Broadway director and former student of Bertolt Brecht arrived at MGM to make his first Hollywood film. Called “A Gun in His Hand,” it would be No. 46 in the “Crime Does Not Pay” series, and an impressive West Coast debut for Joseph Losey.  The loftily idealistic, scientifically precise crime fighter of the early films here becomes a beat patrolman (Tom Trout) who has joined the police only because of the cover it offers him for his criminal activities — an idea that Losey would recycle for his finest American film, the 1951 noir “The Prowler.” J. Edgar Hoover, it seems safe to assume, would have been horrified. (Warner Archive Collection, $39.95, not rated)  SILENT HOUSE The filmmakers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (“Open Water”) present a remake of the Uruguayan film “La Casa Muda,” shot to appear as a single, continuous take in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope,” from 1948. Elizabeth Olsen stars as a woman trapped inside her family vacation home. “The film’s most interesting aspects are its gimmicks rather than its frights,” Neil Genzlinger wrote in The New York Times in March. (Universal, Blu-ray $34.98, DVD $29.98, R)  STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION — SEASON ONE A Blu-ray upgrade for the first season of the 1987 spinoff of the “Star Trek” series, featuring Patrick Stewart as the new captain of a new Starship Enterprise with a crew that includes Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Denise Crosby, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner and Wil Wheaton. “Mr. Stewart does not patronize the role of Captain Picard,” John J. O’Connor wrote in The Times in 1987. “He takes it very seriously indeed, managing at moments of stress to sound very much like Laurence Olivier as Henry V.”(Paramount, Blu-ray $129.99, not rated)  SECRET WORLD: LIVE A fan-favorite Peter Gabriel concert from 1993, filmed in Modena, Italy, and now upgraded to high-definition with new bonus features. (Eagle Rock Entertainment, Blu-ray $19.98, DVD $14.98, not rated)  THE UNTOUCHABLES: THE FOURTH SEASON The fourth and final season of the 1959-63 ABC series starring Robert Stack as a federal agent fighting organized crime in Prohibition-era Chicago. The 30 hourlong episodes are being released in two four-DVD volumes, priced at $39.98 each. (Paramount, not rated)  FOOTNOTE The rivalry between two Israeli Talmudic scholars is exacerbated by the fact that they are father and son. Joseph Cedar (“Beaufort”) directed; with Shlomo Bar-Aba, Lior Ashkenazi and Aliza Rosen. “Deftly turning the law of inverse proportions on its head Mr. Cedar spins a committee-room squabble into something authentically grand: a piercing satire, a poignant family drama and an investigation of the competing claims of honesty, loyalty, ambition and love,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times in March. (Sony, Blu-ray $35.99, DVD $30.99, PG)
Warner Archivesâ six-disc âCrime Does Not Pay: The Complete Shorts Collectionâ gathers 50 or so episodes from a series that ran from 1935 until 1947.