Born to tap: Hollywood's Eleanor Powell made intricate look easy.

Broadway Melody of 1936, Broadway Melody of 1938, Born to Dance, Lady Be Good. Warner Brothers Home Video. DVD. $19.98 each.

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"First of the lady hoofers."

"The most eloquent feet in show business."

"The nimblest lady in tap shoes."

"Without question the most expert feminine tap dancer."

The movie star on the receiving end of these reviews wasn't the pixie-ish Ruby Keeler or the glamorous Ginger Rogers or the brassy Ann Miller. It was the amazingly lithe and loose-limbed Eleanor Powell, who was in a series of musicals in the 1930s and "40s acting a part she was familiar with from real life: the small-town kid who comes to New York, suitcase in hand, to be a dancer.

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If the names of the other tap divas are better known than Powell's these days, it's not because they had more talent. It's because they had longer, more varied careers, becoming familiar to audiences both wider and younger than the ones they'd wowed in their glory days. To begin with, Rogers made 63 movies without Fred Astaire, while Keeler and Powell retired after only about a dozen musicals apiece. Keeler, however, returned to prominence in the '70s with a huge success on Broadway. Rogers and Miller did the Broadway thing too, of course. And both were seen frequently on television in the '50s and '60s.

Powell chose to stay home, doing church and charity work, while her movies--and her reputation as the greatest female dancer in Hollywood--were eclipsed. She returned briefly in a nightclub act in 1961, but a well-reviewed gig at the Latin Quarter could not keep her legend alive for the baby boomers and the generations that followed.

Happily, some recent DVD releases should help restore her to the prominence she deserves. In Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), Born to Dance (1936), and Lady Be Good (1941), she's romanced by the likes of Jimmy Stewart and Robert Taylor and accompanied by the music of George Gershwin and Cole Porter. But the highlight is her incandescent dancing.

Usually playing amiable and down-to-earth, Powell in these films is a brown-haired, broadly smiling gal-pal who seems vaguely surprised--and thoroughly delighted--by what her unruly legs are up to. But sometimes, she charmingly gives the game away, flicking her wrists while her feet follow as if on marionette strings. Those shapely legs do not have a mind of their own: Powell's most decidedly in charge of them, through elaborate Busby Berkeley productions and small-scale solos and even, in Broadway Melody, a dream number on pointe.

She'd begun as a ballet dancer and found professional work quickly as a young teenager. She became a tapper, she told Jennifer Dunning in 1980, only by necessity. When she came to try her luck in New York at 16, displaying her ballet and acrobatic skills at auditions, she was always asked, "Do you tap?" So she had to learn, Dunning wrote, "weeping through her first time step and picking it up at last after her teacher weighed her down with a gunbelt and ballasted her with sandbags."

Her ballet technique and gymnastic expertise are visible in solos she devised to show off her rhythmically intricate, buoyant, and precise tapping. She was a dazzling turner, and her footwork is punctuated with spectacular spins, not to mention splits, handsprings, and backbends. And the super-high kicks she whips out now and again happen so fast you're not sure you really saw them. Just pause the DVD--you saw them.

Powell was also a competent actress. She could give lines a witty, acerbic bite belied by those bouncing brown curls. And MGM surrounded her with slick productions and capable performers.

Still, these films are not exactly cinematic landmarks. The plots are threadbare. In Broadway Melody, Powell pretends to be a French music hall star when high school buddy Robert Taylor refuses to cast her in his musical. In Born to Dance, shipboard comedy meets backstage theatrics as Jimmy Stewart's sailor plots to get Powell a job in--surprise!--a musical. In Lady Be Good, Powell is the best friend watching Ann Sothern and Robert Young play on-again, off-again partners in songwriting and in love.

The ragged stories are typical enough for movies hardly attempting to disguise their vaudeville and operetta roots. Born to Dance includes a number clearly based on Gilbert and Sullivan's "I Am the Captain of the Pinafore." Plainly distinguishable "specialty" acts, like Broadway Melody's extended disquisition, with sound effects, on snoring, turn up regularly to interrupt the plot. In Lady Be Good, even Powell's big solo, in harem pants and with a participating pooch, seems to be one of these.

Then there are the cultural anachronisms, which can be painful and embarrassing. Characters say things like, "That's white of you." A close-up captures a black dancer in full minstrel mode, grinning and bug-eyed. An American performer adapts to a Chinese audience by squinting his eyes and squealing sing-song style.

The reasons to watch, of course, are the musical numbers. Singers like Frances Langford and storied dancers like Buddy and Vilma Ebsen strut their formidable stuff. Even less storied dancers, like Nick Long, Jr. and the adagio team Georges and Jalna, turn in heavenly performances. And, of course, there's Eleanor Powell. In 1934, before her first credited appearance in a film, she was named "greatest feminine tap dancer" by Dancing Masters of America. These films suggest that title may still be hers.

Sylviane Gold writes for The New York Times and other publications.