Busby, Baker, and the Ballerina: a parade of new releases on DVD.

The Busby Berkeley Collection Footlight Parade; Gold Diggers of 1933; Gold Diggers of 1935; Dames; 42nd Street; The Busby Berkeley Disc. Warner Home Video. Six DVDs $59.98 (all titles except The Busby Berkeley Disc available separately), $19.95 each.

If additional confirmation were needed that the movie musical attained its independence and maturity in Busby Berkeley's hands, you can find it here in this sumptuous package of films. With the exception of 42nd Street, all are new to DVD. Today, we cringe at many of the primitive early ventures in the form, like Broadway Melody of 1929, with their stationary cameras and stodgy attempts to emulate live theater.

Then, along came Berkeley, whose direction of the production numbers in these Warner treasures from 1933-35 liberated popular theater dance for the camera. The Berkeley style was unmistakable. It traded in a grandiosity of vision, an eye for dazzling patterns of hordes of tapping and waltzing dancers, mostly female, shot from vertiginous perspectives. (Berkeley, famously, drilled holes in the soundstage ceilings to accommodate his cameras.) He had a fondness for dramatic close-ups and lighting, which allied him to the major photographic artists of his era. Geometry and sensuality met and merged.

Berkeley possessed a sense of social outrage, too. His "Forgotten Man" episode, with Joan Blondell saluting unemployed veterans, deeply stirred Depression-era America. The patterning and expressionist flavor of his style reportedly influenced the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who, in her damned propaganda classic, Triumph of the Will, retained Berkeley's mesmerizing deployment of bodies, but substituted Nazi troops for Broadway chorines.

Set to the infernally tuneful songs of Harry Dubin and A1 Warren, these production numbers stand apart from the sappy, good-natured, backstage plots, in which pre-production code moral standards prevail (man and wife could then still share the same bed on celluloid). Of the films included here, only Gold Diggers of 1935 (with its spectacular "Lullaby of Broadway" finale) was directed by Berkeley, yet his touch is everywhere. The most familiar of these movies is 42nd Street, with its ingenue saving the show.

Yet, I'd first sample the package with Footlight Parade. The final half-hour with its three numbers--"Honeymoon Hotel" (rather naughty for 1933), "By a Waterfall" (hundreds of Esther Williams types posing on a huge wedding cake), and "Shanghai Lil"--is dynamite. James Cagney's charismatic, coiled energy, in motion and repose, cuts through the sweetness poured on by perpetual juveniles Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell.

Warner's package abounds in extras. There's a documentary on Berkeley, contemporaneous cartoons using the same songs, a two-reeler with the young Bob Hope, and sundry promotional material. The sixth disc includes numbers from other Berkeley musicals. Seventy years later, you still can't believe your eyes.

The Josephine Baker Collection Siren of the Tropics (1928); Zou Zou (1934); Princess Tam Tam (1935). Kino Video. One DVD each; $29.95 each.

In one of the greatest acts of transformation in the 20th century, Freda Josephine McDonald, a washerwoman's daughter from St. Louis, metamorphosed into Josephine Baker, the dancer, singer, and actor who brought France to its feet. There, in the 1920s, she paved the way for an appreciation of African American artists denied them at home. Baker died in 1975, and a younger generation must take her magic, sensuality, and verve on faith.

Marking Baker's centennial, Kino has issued her entire feature film legacy in crisp prints. Then a star at Paris' Folies Bergeres, Baker galvanized the world with her first, a silent movie, Siren of the Tropics (1928), in which her Charleston encompasses so many cultural influences that Baker quickly made the transition from exotic beauty to mainstream icon. She doesn't dance at all in Zou Zou (1934), in which her co-star is French screen legend Jean Gabin. But the sheer gracefulness with which Baker moves across the frame, her flair for light comedy, and her American-accented French are irresistible. Plus, there's the Haiti number, with Baker propped up on a swing in a huge birdcage. Perhaps her choreographer, one Floyd Du Pont, had seen many of those Busby Berkeley movies.

Baker soars in three production numbers in Princess Tam Tam (1935), a jazz age Pygmalion saga, in which her presence lights up the screen. Oddly, the accompanying talking heads documentary, spread among the three DVDs, ignores her heroic work for the French Resistance during World War II and the chateau for orphans of all nationalities to which Baker devoted so much of her efforts in her later years.

Margot Directed and edited by Tony Palmer. Kultur. One DVD; $29.99.

Documentarian Tony Palmer's slash-and-burn, tell-all style yields a Margot Fonteyn whose accomplishment as the world's most famous ballerina was bought at the price of considerable personal anguish. Both as a teenager and mature artist, her vulnerability led her to unwise relationships that brought her lasting heartbreak.

Yet Fonteyn, the consummate professional, danced brilliantly through it all, extending her career into its fourth decade when Rudolf Nureyev joined her at The Royal Ballet. She died in 1991 in poverty and her end was not pretty. Palmer has scoured the archives for familiar performance clips (Giselle, Romeo and Juliet, The Sleeping Beauty) and rarer footage, like the rehearsals for Ashton's Birthday Offering.

The interviews with Fonteyn's colleagues, family members, and press chroniclers include a virtual who's who of dance in England. Palmer has gathered or recycled commentaries by Nureyev, Ashton, Lynn Seymour, Robert Helpmann, Roland Petit, Ninette de Valois, Monica Mason, Michael Somes, Beryl Grey, biographer Meredith Daneman, and Dance Magazine senior consulting editor Clive Barnes. Fonteyn was loved and respected by all. But, after wallowing in the mud for nearly three hours, one wonders if learning all the unsavory details enhances our appreciation of the artist.