Music: Whimpering In the Dark?

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After some seven years as a world celebrity, Frankie Sinatra at last found time for a personal appearance at London's famed Palladium. By last week, British bobby-soxers had given him the standard, screaming welcome, and senior British critics were chewing their whiskers, trying to figure out just what Frankie has.

People who simply put Frankie down as "The Voice" are missing the point, wrote Sunday Timesman Harold Hobson. It is not The Voice, but "The Smile, that does such enormous, such legendary execution ... the shy, deprecating smile, with the quiver at the corner of the mouth, that makes the young ladies in the gallery swoon in ecstasy, and the maturer matrons in the dress circle gurgle with protective delight."

Considering that Frankie came from the U.S., the quality of this smile was enough to make a critic marvel. Marveled Hobson :

"Here is an artist who, hailing from the most amiably rowdy and self-confident community the world has ever known, has elected to express the timidity that can never be wholly driven out of the boast-fullest heart. To a people whose ideal of manhood is husky, full-blooded and self-reliant, he has chosen to suggest that, under the ... crashing self-assertion, man is still only a child, frightened and whimpering in the dark."