Stars in Your Eyes Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.0

Stars in Your Eyes Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 10, 2021

The annals of Hollywood musicals are full to the brim with "hey! we have a barn/theater/unused venue, let's put on a show!" setups, notably in a number of well remembered efforts from Metro Goldwyn Mayer. For something rather similar, albeit with a bit of a foreign flavor, 1956's Stars In Your Eyes offers the same general idea, this time in England, just as surprisingly long lived music hall entertainments are expiring, and performers are seeking new avenues to ply their trade. There's therefore a kind of melancholic undertow to what would otherwise be the story of young (?) singers, dancers and comedians banding together since, popular tastes (meaning television) be damned, "the (live and in person) show must go on". In fact, television rears its "ugly" head in this enterprise, as married performers Jimmy Knowles (Nat Jackley) and Sally Bishop (Pat Kirkwood) have to decide whether it's actually better to be unemployed than to suffer the indignities of appearing on the small screen.

A secondary couple is also part of the plot, with songwriter David Laws (Bonar Colleano, who died tragicallly young in a car accident not that long after this film came out) nursing his breakup with wife Ann Hart (Dorothy Squires, then Mrs. Roger Moore, in her only film appearance) by drinking too much. David has access to a dilapidated theater, and after some interstitial comedy involving Jimmy and Sally, a whole troupe of potentially out of work entertainers bands together to restore the place and, yep, put on a show. Unfortunately, some criminally minded developers want the theater for their own purposes, leading to supposed mayhem. There's actually not a ton to the narrative in Stars in Your Eyes, and the result is actually rather like a filmed stage show, with a series of either comedy or song vignettes simply following each other, in what might be perceived as an homage to the dying art forms of musical halls and/or vaudeville.

My hunch is that Stars in Your Eyes is probably going to be of most interest to British audiences, since few on the American side of the pond or indeed elsewhere in the world may have even heard of most of the cast. The film is an appealing time capsule in that regard, though neither the shtick laden humor nor the probably less than stellar song score offers really great opportunities for the cast. The film is bright and colorful, and there are occasional bits that find their target, though notably they tend to be more character driven than the ostensible "on stage" comedy. It's interesting that the film seemed to hint at then nascent "rock 'n' roll" in some of its key art (see the cover reproduced above), because the music in this piece is definitely more in a traditional "easy listening" format comprised of lush ballads. Obviously, the marketing gurus behind this effort knew there was more than just television threatening not only live entertainment, but musical films themselves.

Stars in Your Eyes Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Stars in Your Eyes is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Network with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Network only sent a check disc for purposes of this review, and so I'm not privy to any information that might be included in an advertised insert booklet, but in doing some background research in preparation for this review, I discovered that there had been an Indiegogo fundraiser for a restoration, which included this verbiage:

Stars in Your Eyes has not been seen for many years. The only print is in very poor condition and would not survive the scanning process necessary to make it available to be viewed. There is just one surviving original copy of the 35mm Eastmancolor negative that must be converted to digital format in order to restore and preserve this slice of British film history. We are appealing to you, as someone who shares our passion for classic British film, to help to bring this title back to life. Stars in Your Eyes not only has unique and wonderful performances but also shows a great part of our social history, fashions and passions from the 1950s.

Please help to raise the money to make the restoration happen this year – an important year for Adelphi Films as it's our 80th anniversary. Adelphi Films is a small outfit with a big task. We struggle financially and any money that we do receive goes straight in digitising more titles. Stars in Your Eyes is our biggest project to date. It is our only film in colour and we just don't have the money to do this one alone. So as well as some great perks, you will also have the satisfaction of knowing that you are making a really important contribution to British film history.

The money will be used to digitise and restore Stars in Your Eyes from the 35mm negative that is in the BFI archive. Restoration is a complex, painstaking and skilled process that must be done by a human expert, frame by frame. Adelphi Films have successfully remastered and restored over 20 of our titles during the past 10 years. The more funds that we can raise the more time can be given to the restoration, and the higher the quality of the finished product. We will work closely with archive and technical experts to make sure that the restoration of 'Stars in Your Eyes' is done to the highest standard possible in both sound and video. If we don't reach our funding goal we will seek other sponsorship and continue to work towards remastering this wonderful film. Any money you donate will go directly to the restoration.

That fundraising appeal is (obviously) now closed, but from the looks of things, Adelphi fell far short of their $25,000 fundraising goal, raising only around $5,000, which may indicate that the film is not even that well known and/or well regarded in England, despite the studio's statements to the contrary. However, this restoration does a largely commendable job, especially in terms of having eliminated any huge signs of age related wear and tear. The Eastmancolor palette tends to fluctuate pretty widely, however, with some scenes looking relatively natural and nicely suffused, and others having less pleasing densities and with primaries skewed toward a kind of pastel look, often with an almost pinkish hue. Detail levels are generally very appealing, and the film has a nicely burnished production design in terms of both costumes and sets, all of which look nice and precise throughout, even when the palette can be a bit wonky. If the element looked anything like the washed out trailer included on this release as a supplement, the restoration effort here was nothing short of heroic.

Stars in Your Eyes Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Stars in Your Eyes features an LPCM 2.0 Mono track that has slight but noticeable distortion that creates a kind of rumble in the midrange in some of the musical elements. That said, dialogue and sound effects tend to make it through the gauntlet of age related wear and tear rather well overall. Optional English subtitles are available.

Stars in Your Eyes Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Stars in Your Eyes Trailer (1080p; 2:22)


• A Ray of Sunshine (1080p; 54:29) stems from 1950 and is subtitled rather hilariously An Irresponsible Medley of Song and Dance. I'm guessing that this is what may have been a "second feature" for double features back in the day, in tihs musical featuring Ted Ray, as well as (I'm not making this up) Ivy Benson and her Girls Band and Roberta and her Feathered Friends.


• A Ray of Sunshine Trailer (1080p; 2:00)


• The Nitwits on Parade (1080p; 24:10) is a 1949 Adelphi short focusing on the comedy duo of Sid Millward and Wally Stewart. There is some wacky musical stuff in this one that mind remind some folks of Americans like Spike Jonze.


• The Kilties are Coming (1080p; 52:38) is a kind of odd 1951 piece featuring The Royal Kiltie Juniors along with Peter Sinclair.


• Image Gallery (1080p; 5:19)

Additionally, the disc boots to two vintage trailers of films also released by Network on Blu-ray, 1963's What a Crazy World, where rather incredibly Freddie and the Dreamers are heard performing "Short Shorts" that later became a staple of American television commercials, and the lesser remembered Powell-Pressburger effort Oh... Rosalinda!.

Stars in Your Eyes Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy may get a kick out of screenshot 19 I've included with this review, as it perhaps hints at a subliminal reason for the name of one of Douglas Adams' characters. This release is probably the very definition of a niche product, and for those interested in mid-1950s British musical fare, this memorializes a number of now largely forgotten performers in a bright and colorful way. The restoration of what was evidently a problematic element encounters some hurdles in both video and audio, but the supplementary package is quite enjoyable and should be appreciated by cultural historians in particular.