Ann Todd stars in three of the five movies here, and the reason is a love story of its own. David Lean fell for her while making The Passionate Friends when both were married to other people. They eventually married, and Madeleine became, in large part, his wedding present to her. Anyone opening this box expecting deserts, railways, and thousands of extras is a few years early. The Bridge on the River Kwai was still two years away when this collection ends in Venice.

The Passionate Friends (1949), adapted from H. G. Wells, finds Todd (The Seventh Veil) as a married woman who unexpectedly reconnects with the former lover she left behind (Trevor Howard, Brief Encounter). Claude Rains (Casablanca) plays the wealthy husband who realizes something has shifted. Lean took over after production stalled under Ronald Neame, and the finished film lost money. The nested flashback structure drew complaints, but the emotional triangle gives all three actors room to hurt one another without turning anyone into a simple villain.

Madeleine (1950) makes its worldwide Blu-ray debut in this box. Todd reprises the role she had played onstage, portraying Madeleine Smith, the Glasgow woman tried in 1857 for murdering her secret lover. Leslie Banks plays her father in his final film. Lean later dismissed Madeleine as his worst picture, although later critics have been more willing to defend its control, ambiguity, and claustrophobic view of Victorian respectability.

The Sound Barrier (1952) leaves drawing rooms behind for test pilots and jet engines. Ralph Richardson (Doctor Zhivago) plays aircraft manufacturer John Ridgefield, a man determined to build a plane capable of breaking the sound barrier, while his daughter Susan (Todd) increasingly questions what that obsession is costing the people around him. Terence Rattigan wrote the screenplay, and real jets filmed at an English airfield give the flying sequences an immediacy studio work could not fake. The film won BAFTA’s Best Film and an Academy Award for sound before gradually becoming one of Lean’s less frequently seen titles.

Hobson’s Choice (1954) is the warmest movie in the collection. Henry Hobson (Charles Laughton, The Private Life of Henry VIII) expects his three daughters to run his Salford boot shop without wages or complaints. His eldest, Maggie (Brenda de Banzie, The Pink Panther), has other ideas and essentially chooses the meek bootmaker Will Mossop (John Mills, Ryan’s Daughter) as her husband before he has fully processed the news. Malcolm Arnold scores Hobson’s drunken moonlit wander with a musical saw. Laughton plays a household tyrant, and Lean somehow makes him impossible to hate.

Summertime (1955) closes the set in color and on location. Katharine Hepburn (The African Queen) plays Jane Hudson, a lonely American taking her first trip to Venice, where she falls for a charming local man (Rossano Brazzi, South Pacific) and then learns he is married. Lean shot extensively in the city and later called the movie his favorite of his own work. It earned Academy Award nominations for both Lean and Hepburn, and the film’s romantic image of Venice reportedly helped send tourism climbing.

What makes the collection interesting is watching Lean’s scale expand without his interests changing as much as you might expect. Whether he is filming a marriage, a murder trial, a test plane, a boot shop, or Venice itself, he remains fascinated by people choosing between what they want and what the world expects of them. The epics are coming. The filmmaker is already here.