This week's big DVD news -- and we're talking "big" in every sense here -- isn't Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. It's not Superbad, Arctic Tale or the 30th anniversary edition of New York, New York. It's not even Werewolf: The Devil's Hound or Shira: The Vampire Samurai. In most respects this week hands us just another release schedule bullet-pointed with movies good and bad, most having all the distinction and staying power of a traffic report.

However, elbowing its way to the front of the crowd is the Ford at Fox collection. This mammoth 21-disc boxed set selects 24, or roughly half, of the films John Ford made for 20th Century Fox during 32 of his 52 years as a director. It's a testimony and tribute to one of America's pantheon moviemakers, and gives us access to a body of work that's permanently written into the hard drive of America's culture and our often romanticized self-image.

Gary Giddins in the New York Sun notes that for "a director who drew on diverse literary sources, accepted many studio assignments, and lost countless studio battles, Ford was one of our most consistent filmmakers. Yet his perspective was neither static nor predictable. I find myself treasuring his collected works even more than the masterpieces because I care about what he saw and how he thought at each stage of his long career."

Or as Orson Welles once put it, "I learned filmmaking by studying the Old Masters -- and by that I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford."

Dave Kehr, in an appreciation in Tuesday's New York Times, says that "other studios, notably Warner Brothers with Stanley Kubrick and Universal with Alfred Hitchcock, have produced collections devoted to single directors, but no previous effort has matched what Fox has put into this impressive undertaking." The complete collection is now available either as a single box or broken up into three mini-collections: The Essential John Ford, John Ford's American Comedies and John Ford's Silent Epics.

The collection dips back in time far enough to sample Ford's work from the silent era, including two versions of The Iron Horse (1924), a mammoth-scale western (two temporary cities were built to accommodate the crew) about the building of the transcontinental railroad, and 3 Bad Men (1926), long thought lost, in which three bandits appoint themselves protectors of the heroine, whose settler-father is killed early in the proceedings.

Later films in the set are acknowledged masterworks and other movie-lover favorites, such as Pilgrimage (1933), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), My Darling Clementine (1946) and the comedy When Willie Comes Marching Home (1950).

Among the recurring talents on screen here -- movie stars' movie stars -- you'll find John Wayne (Ford made him a star in 1939's Stagecoach), Henry Fonda (whose Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath is a model of heroic American decency and fortitude), James Stewart (in three near-spoofs of the Western genre) and Maureen O'Hara ("When How Green Was My Valley finally wrapped," she said, "I thought John Ford was a walking god.") That's young Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart in their sole on-screen pairing in the prison comedy Up the River (1930).

About the three Will Rogers vehicles here -- Doctor Bull (1933), Judge Priest (1934), and Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) -- Giddins pegs them as "small-town idylls, anecdotal in nature, spontaneous in style. They are funny, nostalgic, gimlet-eyed displays of societies closed off by time, place, and prejudice." Giddins also observes that The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) delivers "a prophetic brief on attitudes toward torture."

Some of these films have been newly restored, and some have never before seen an official release on home video. Several have been released on DVD before, while bringing others into the digital era means that even the earliest title, Just Pals from 1920, receives a Dolby 5.0 surround sound treatment. Some come with fine authoritative extras such as commentary tracks and other value-added supplements, which the studio helpfully list at foxclassics.com. The always obliging folks at DVD Beaver provide an extras list along with photos and comparisons with earlier releases.

The impressively packaged collection -- think carrying a portable television under your arm -- also includes an exclusive hard-cover book with rare photographs from Ford's career, lobby card reproductions, production stills and an in-depth look at Ford's work. A final disc gives us a 2007 documentary, Becoming John Ford.

The whole shebang doesn't come cheap at a suggested retail price of $299.98 (with Amazon.com and other outlets cutting that by a third or so). Individually, the three mini-collections go for $49.98 or less. Single discs of selected films from the collection are available for $19.98 or less. The documentary Becoming John Ford is available separately and bundled into the Essential John Ford set.

Which gives the last word to Richard Corliss in Time magazine: "As for the price, so what? Christmas is coming, and the old-film fan in you deserves a treat. Besides, this set costs only $16 more than Seinfeld: The Complete Series, and, hell, you can see all those episodes on free TV."

Read about more new DVDs.

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Mark Bourne

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