Henry Fonda slid easily into endless personae — comic, heroic, tragic and everything in between — while the real Fonda remained mostly elusive, even to members of his family.

What we do know is that he had great insight into the people he played in film, and unlike most of his contemporaries, he made far more good films than bad. Four of them are collected in the latest addition to Warner Brothers' excellent-value "Signature Collection" series.

In 1962's "Advise and Consent," director Otto Preminger's adaptation of Allan Drury's inside-politics best-seller, Fonda is a Cold War-era nominee for secretary of state who is accused of being a fellow traveler by a McCarthy-like senator. Though the movie can't quite rise above its page-turning source material, Fonda does.

Likewise, 1965's "The Battle of the Bulge" is hardly the greatest World War II film ever made. The star-studded spectacle, produced for Cinerama theaters, was not even the best movie about the Allies' response to Hitler's December 1944 offensive. Yet Fonda, playing the only officer who foresees the plan, gives the film a gravitas that keeps it centered amid all the tangential, episodic subplots.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1957 drama "The Wrong Man," based on a true story about a New York nightclub musician accused of robbery and done in a semidocumentary style, is almost completely dependent on Fonda's convincing portrayal of a man under siege. We say almost because Vera Miles, playing a wife coming undone by the ordeal, is also terrific.

No caveats are necessary for 1955's "Mister Roberts" in which Fonda re-creates his Broadway role of a World War II naval officer frustrated at being stuck on a cargo ship under the command of an eccentric captain (Jimmy Cagney). Directed by John Ford, for whom Fonda often worked, and Mervyn LeRoy, who took over when Ford became ill, the film made a star and Oscar winner out of Jack Lemmon. But Fonda is the incontestable anchor.