Billy Wilder’s noir classic “Double Indemnity” (1944), by far the most famous of four films teaming Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, has been available on DVD since 1998, but it hasn’t been until recently their other teamings have been available for evaluation in the format. The Warner Archive Collection unearthed “The Moonlighter” (1952), a western that was originally presented in 2-D and the TCM Vault Collection has been offering Mitchell Leisen’s excellent “Remember the Night” (1940), a comedy-drama with as script by Preston Sturges that really should be better known.

Today, the final missing piece, Douglas Sirk’s “There’s Always Tomorrow” (1956) debuts as part of Universal’s very welcome, six-title “Barbara Stanwyck Collection.” Like many other stars nutured during Hollywood’s Golden Era, Stanwyck and MacMurray were struggling to stay on the big screen in the ’50s often appearing in westerns (a genre that came more naturally to her than to him), noirs and what were then called women’s pictures. (Stanwyck made her last theatrical film and moved to TV in 1964, but MacMurray’s career found a second wind with Disney’s “The Shaggy Dog” (1959) and Wilder’s “The Apartment” (1960), around the same time the actor began his long-running TV series “My Three Sons”).

“There’s Always Tomorrow” was one of numerous films directed for producer Ross Hunter, who showcased aging actresses like Jane Wyman and Lana Turner in lavish Technicolor vehicles like “Magnificent Obsession” and “Imitation of Life,” both remakes of Universal weepies from the ’30s. The Stanwyck-MacMurray swansong had also been filmed previously (in 1934, with Frank Morgan and Binnie Barnes), but it was a much less lavish affair, an 84-minute black-and-white programmer intended for the double-bills that Universal specialized in during this era.

Though Stanwyck gets top billing, the storyline focuses on MacMurray as a vaguely discontented middle-aged Los Angeles toy manufacturer. He’s been neglected by his wife (Joan Bennett, another former big star) who focuses all her attention on their three very self-centered children.

Which leaves our hero vulnerable when Stanwyck, a glamorous, never-married former employee who has always carried a torch for him, shows up one day. When MacMurray’s wife cancels on a trip to a desert resort at the last minute, he spends a pleasant but entirely innocent weekend in Stanwyck’s company. Unfortunately, his oldest son (William Reynolds) turns up unannounced and comes to an entirely different conclusion — and leaves before confronting dad.

Stanwyck gets an understandably icy reception from the kids when she goes to dinner at McMurray’s house. Bennett’s oblivious, and MacMurray is furious. More important, MacMurray realizes how much he enjoys Stanwyck’s attention. She’s sorely tempted by his advances, but has second thoughts when his two oldest children decide to stage what would now be called an intervention.

Filled his trademark visual touches (lots of mirrors and a toy robot that symbolizes MacMurray’s predicament), “There’s Always Tomorrow” is now considered one of Sirk’s major works, a devastating critique on ’50s conformity. But it can also be viewed as a celebration of values in an era when adults routinely decided to put aside their own selfish needs for the sake of children.

Purists should note that “There’s Always Tomorrow” is being presented, like the other films in the set, in the full-frame format with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio — rather than in the crop originally presented in theaters, which was either 1.66:1 or 1.85:1

Stanwyck is less feliticously paired with sci-fi stalwart Richard Carlson for her other Sirk film in the set, the weepie “All I Desire” (1953). This one is set in 1910, when a failed actress returns to her high school principal husband and the three children she abandoned a decade earlier for one of her daughters debuts in the school play.

Stanwyck would like a reconcilation with the aloof Carlson, who has been holding off overtures from the drama teacher (Maureen O’Sullivan). But our heroine herself has to hold off the rather more insistent overtures of the admirer (Lyle Betteger) who forced her to leave town in the first place. The film seems to be hinting that her son, played by a pre-“Father Knows Best” Billy Gray, is actually his offspring and not Carlson’s.

Betteger ends up shot — and even Sirk can’t pull off an improbably happy ending that was reportedly foisted on him by producer Hunter for this 80-minute opus.

“The Lady Gambles” (1950), directed by the soon-to-be-blacklisted Michael Gordon (“Pillow Talk” and grandfather of Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Stanwyck’s Universal debut, is an A-picture with an excellent performance as a woman who discovers her addiction to gambling while visiting Las Vegas with her journalist husband (Robert Preston). With a very good Stephen McNally as a casino boss who preys on her weakness, it tries mightily to do for gambling what “The Lost Weekend” did for alcoholism.

The other three films in the set are from Stanwyck’s years at Paramount. “The Bride Wore Boots” (1946), directed by actor Irving Pichel, is a silly marital farce about a horsewoman who separates from a historian husband (Robert Cummings) who can’t stand the beasts.

The set is completed by two of her teamings with frequent co-star Joel McCrea, who she had worked with on the infrequently seen “Banjo on My Knee” (1936) and Cecil B. DeMille’s “Union Pacific” (1939), which is available on DVD.

The normally reliable William Wellman’s “The Great Man’s Lady” (1942), though meant sincerely, is a 90 minute soap opera that almost plays like a Preston Struges parody of DeMille. Stanwyck appears in heavy makeup to play a 100-year-old woman in a lengthy prologue and epilogue, recounting her life story to a reporter (K.T. Stevens, daughter of director Sam Wood).

It’s the risible tale of how Stanwyck, decades earlier, sacrifices her happiness so that McCrea could become a city-building senator. McCrea comes off much less well than Brian Donlevy as his romantic rival — though Donlevy is saddled with a lachrymose speech about how he buried her and McCrea’s twin daughters after a flood (and Wellman follows this with a hokey image of their resting place).

Much, much better is the oldest film in the set, Alfred Santell’s zippy “Internes Can’t Take Money” (1937). A year before the debut of the eponymous MGM series with Lew Ayres, McCrea introduces Max Brand’s durable character of the idealistic Dr. Kildare, who in this iteration practices at a lovely art deco Manhattan hospital and doesn’t have to endure long-winded lectures by the mentoring Dr. Gillespie.

Top-billed Stanwyck has the central role, as a woman who is trying to avoid sleeping with a gangster (Stanley Ridges) so she can find the daughter her late husband stashed in an orphange while she was in prison. Fortunately, she gets lots of help from Dr. Kildare and a Runyonesque gangster (Lloyd Nolan) in this action-packed 77-minute crime picture.