Custom DVD Cover: Sunset Boulevard

Not sure whether carrying the strip of film onto the spine works or not; it looks too dull otherwise.

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Custom DVD Cover: Pickup on South Street

Optimum can be funny about DVD covers; most of their vintage stuff looks great with the standalone ethos I really like, original artwork and so on. But every now and then they just use stills and blocks of primary colour, as per the original sleeve for Sam Fuller's classic. This was a fun one to do as there were a couple of really nice old posters for the film that were easy to use.

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Custom DVD Cover: Journey Into Fear

The maybe-directed-by-Orson-Welles-but-probably-not minor classic. The US posters were all rather dull efforts for the time, dominated by billings, so a major fudge of a French version was needed. Quite happy with this one when there were so few options available, though.

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Custom DVD Cover: D.O.A.

Public domain films are a double-edged sword; they're cheap and even free depending on where you look but any retail release will have corners cut, most just using poor stills. This one has one of the original posters on the front with a Swedish version cannibalised for the back, all slapped on the Optimum template because I really like Optimum.

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Custom DVD Cover: In a Lonely Place

Columbia's vintage stuff has the considerable distinction of making even MGM's stuff look like hard work. Though in this case it was quite difficult to find a poster not utterly dominated by the "Bogart suspense film with the surprise finish" tag-line. In the end I went with a classy French poster with the title pasted in front a US poster.

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Custom DVD Cover:Les Diaboliques

One of the greatest films ever made, Clouzot's classic is generally lumbered with dull covers of the Criterion type. UK licencees C'est La Vie got using the majestic poster on the front cover right but got just about everything else wrong. Switching it to the ever-useful Optimum template was a start.

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Film Review - The Wages of Fear

One of the very greatest films ever made, a fantastic, nihilistic suspense thriller. Centering on four expat drifters stuck in a small oil town in the middle of the Mexican desert, all desperate to get home but unable to afford the air fare.