Campaign launched to restore singer’s blockbuster
A CAMPAIGN has been launched to raise funds to restore a feature film featuring one of the most famous singers to come out of Llanelli.
Dorothy Squires made one feature film, with the small but important British studio Adelphi Films. That film was Stars in Your Eyes from 1956.
It is the quintessential British blockbuster of the 1950s – great musical numbers and dance routines, comedy, romance and pathos. It’s a film regarded as a really important part of British cinema history.
It also stars Pat Kirkwood and features performances by Jimmy Clitheroe, Joan Sims, Vera Day and Freddie Frinton.
Stars in Your Eyes, in which Dorothy has a starring role, is kept in the BFI National Archive but has not been seen for many years because the only print is in very poor condition. It is now planned to restore and digitise from the 35mm negative in the BFI archive.
Adelphi is a small company which struggles financially. So they have set up a crowd funding campaign to raise the funds needed to restore the film.
It is expensive to do because the film is in colour and because restoration is a painstaking task which has to happen frame by frame by a human expert and is expensive.
Dorothy Squires was born in 1915 in her parents’ carnival caravan in Pontyberem, about 12 miles from Llanelli.
She began to perform professionally as a singer at the age of 16 in the working men’s club in Pontyberem. She owned the Astoria Theatre in Llanelli with her first husband Billy Reid. She later married actor Roger Moore, best known as James Bond.
She spent the last part of her life in Trebanog in the Rhondda Valley and died in 1998.
Adelphi Films holds the honour of being Britain’s longest running independent film company celebrating their 80th anniversary year in 2019. Adelphi Films was a major producer and distributor of British films throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
The Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to restore Stars in Your Eyes is at https://igg.me/at/starsinyoureyes