Quand tu me souris

Most enjoyable film with Sinatra and Shelley Winters in a love triangle and messy criminal goings on. Specifically interesting is the part of Raymond Burr, who is a real meany, and cameo roles abound including Tony Curtis and Jeff Chandler, among others who look like they're waiting for something to happen! It does! The music and singing is great! The acting is great! Be ready to enjoy! 7/10

Any excuse like Meet Danny Wilson you can get to hear Frank Sinatra sing some great old standards is something to take advantage of. Problem with Meet Danny Wilson is that when Sinatra stops singing, he's really one obnoxious boor in this film.

Singer Frank Sinatra and his accompanist piano player Alex Nicol are making a meager living in a whole lot of dives until top singer Shelley Winters hears them and gets them hired by her gangster boss Raymond Burr. Burr's got eyes for her, Sinatra has eyes for her, but she only sees Nicol. That leads to a whole lot of complications.

What further leads to complications is Raymond Burr's verbal contract to get 50% of Sinatra's earnings. Burr doesn't like things in writing just fork over the money and he has 32 caliber lawyer if needed.

Some have said this is a thinly veiled Sinatra autobiographical film. If so it's a picture of Frank no one could take. I'm still trying to figure out why Nicol puts up with him. They're old army buddies, but that only takes you so far.

Danny Wilson is one of the least attractive characters Sinatra ever brought to the screen. But when he's singing, my oh my.

Not at all bad. Meet Danny Wilson, a show-business melodrama with a lot of songs thrown in, betrays a distinct noirish tinge which darkens as the movie progresses. It's a thinly-veiled knockoff of the stories about Frank Sinatra's early days in show business – from the shrieking bobby-soxers to the extortionist contract that almost held him back. Obviously, it stars Sinatra, at a low ebb in his career before he had gained the imperial control of his later days as Chairman of the Board, and before he had assembled the legendary `cool' that, as much as his voice, was to become his hallmark.

Crooner Danny Wilson and his pianist/manager/buddy (Alex Nichol) are a couple of rough-and-ready slum-bred boys having trouble breaking into the big time. Through the help of a lounge singer they meet up with (Shelly Winters), they get a gig in a posh nightclub run by a mobbed-up entrepreneur (Raymond Burr). The catch is, Burr spots Sinatra's potential and demands half of his future take. A messy love triangle emerges, too, with Sinatra falling head over heels for Winters, who's smitten with the loyal square rigger Nichols. The plot points get connected with the arrival of Success, in the form of recording contracts, attendant royalties and even the movies.

Most arresting is Burr as gangster Nick Driscoll. An indispensable fixture of the noir cycle, where so often he played the Heavy Menace, here he takes on a better-written, more shaded role. In addition, he's slimmed down drastically, and the slimming brings out his huge and expressive – even seductive – eyes. But he still doles out the menace, even if it's cushioned in unaccustomed suavity. Apart from Sinatra, he's the most memorable actor in the film (certainly more memorable than the generic Nichol).

Sinatra performs several of the hits which were to enter his standard repertory; he also duets with Winters in a patter-song. Meet Danny Wilson remains strangely obscure, but, despite a warm and perfunctory wrap-up, it's a better crafted and more solid outing than many of the movies he made in his pigs-in-clover Rat Pack days.

Firstly, I like the directness of the title. Apparently one of those films Sinatra made when he was on his career downward curve before "From Here To Eternity" on screen and Capitol Records on vinyl set him aright a couple of years later. Me, I really enjoyed it and wouldn't wonder it might have gotten a better reception and been better remembered if it had been made after 1953 and all that.

The story's pretty far fetched as Sinatra, Alex Nicol, Raymond Burr and a young Shelley Winters play out a love-rectangle if you will with surprisingly, Nicol being the one who gets the girl. Burr is the mobster with designs on her after he employs her as a singer at one of his clubs and who then takes singer and pianist duo Nicol and Sinatra on as their agent but at a hefty 50% cut of their earnings. Nicol is the nice guy, older than Frank's Danny Wilson and obviously some sort of mentor / father figure to him which is just as well as Frank's clearly going through his wild years (thanks, Tom Waits) always one misheard remark or misunderstanding away from a fist fight, from which Nicol usually extricates him.

How the intertwining love stories and the duo's situation with Burr resolve themselves are a little rushed and pat into the bargain, but there's enough grit and drama to see it through to a satisfactory conclusion.

The story goes that Sinatra and Winters didn't get along on set, but you wouldn't really know it here as they make a feisty and watchable couple. I don't recall seeing Nicol in a movie before but liked his work here, the straight man to firecracker Frankie. Burr actually isn't much on camera but conveys a credible sense of malevolence when he does.

The main attraction for Sinatra aficionados is the chance to see the still young Francis Albert looking good and sounding great rendering a nice selection of well known songs in fine style, including "All Of Me", "When You're Smiling", "That Old Black Magic" and "I've Got A Crush On You". He also has a knockout duet with Winters singing "A Good Man Is Hard To Find".

Other things to like were the New York settings, although much of it was probably recreated I'd guess, a one-line cameo by Tony Curtis and there's a cute scene where Sinatra effectively invents the first flash-mob at the airport to try to stop Winters leaving him, just after she's reluctantly become engaged to him.

So there you have it, part musical, part drama, part thriller, an unusual cocktail of a movie but these shaken up ingredients settle well together and made for a good 90 minutes well spent.

This musical has Frank Sinatra in the title role as a bantam rooster of a fellow, who picks fights with anyone who annoys him, but has a marvelous singing voice. Shelley Winters is Joy Carroll, a nightclub thrush Danny falls in love with. Alex Nicol is Mike Ryan, Wilson's manager, piano player and roommate. Raymond Burr is a gangster who owns the nightclub where Joy sings, and where Danny gets his big break.

Sinatra is in good voice here, especially on "That Ol' Black Magic" and his duet with Winters, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find". Aside from their duet, Sinatra has zero chemistry with Winters. Winters does well in her scenes with Burr and Nicol, but she seems angry in almost all of her scenes with Sinatra. Burr makes a good impression as the gangster Nick Driscoll.

From what I've read in Winters' autobiographies and biographies of Sinatra, the two apparently couldn't stand each other, and the film almost didn't get finished. They both walked off the set more than once, had multiple screaming matches, and during the shooting of a hospital scene, Winters capped off one screaming match with Sinatra during the filming of a hospital scene by throwing a bedpan at him. It connected. The film ends abruptly, with the two stars in separate shots, not together in the same scene.