Les pieds dans le plat

Although another viewer said that Danny Kaye looks like he was doing something originally meant for Jerry Lewis, The Man From The Diner's Club actually is taken part and parcel from the Bob Hope comedy Alias Jesse James.

In the Hope film he plays a life insurance salesman who sells a policy to Jesse James and spends the whole film trying to get it back and rescinded. In this film Kaye works at the Diner's Club Credit Card company and accidentally okays a credit card for gangster Telly Savalas.

Savalas has enough of his own problems, his American assets are frozen in lieu of an income tax liability and he's trying to flee the country to Mexico where he's got cash stashed away. Savalas has a distinct physical trait in that he's got one foot a size 10 and the other a size 11. He's got a guy picked out for a homicide with the same characteristics who goes and gets killed in traffic accident.

But when Kaye comes to call about the Diner's Club card, Savalas notices he has the same set of feet. Another pigeon, but Kaye in his usual bumbling way manages to get through it all.

The Man From The Diner's Club sports a good supporting cast in Martha Hyer who is so beautiful you can't conceive of a bumbling Danny Kaye getting anywhere near here. Cara Williams plays a nice part as Savalas's brain dead moll and she has a terrific drunk scene. George Kennedy plays a similarly brain dead muscle guy for Savalas and he shows a nice flair for comedy that rarely was utilized in his career. Everett Sloane is Kaye's excitable boss and Martin Caine is his sneaky rival in the company.

Kaye has some good moments in the final chase scene where just about the entire cast gets involved. His best moment is with Ann Morgan Guilbert who has designed a system for information retrieval on those old punch cards that computers back in the stone age utilized. Twice in the film the bungling Kaye flips a switch that sends a blizzard of punch cards spewing around the office. That bit was partially taken from the Tracy/Hepburn comedy Desk Set. In fact I think some of the set for that film's computer Emirac was used in this film also from Columbia.

It's not Danny Kaye's best film and it certainly was cobbled together from other sources, but I think his still legion of fans will be pleased with it.

This movie attempts to replace Danny Kaye's usual verbal fireworks with adolescent slapstick, and it doesn't work.

Slapstick can be very funny, when done properly, and Danny did a good job of it in "The Court Jester", but here it falls flat.

I honestly didn't laugh at a single gag in the movie. It obviously wasn't tailored to Danny Kaye"s unique talents, which his earlier comedies were. It's much too generic. But worse, it's simply not funny.

And since Danny Kaye can be an incredibly funny performer, the fault obviously lies with the weak script, which plays like a throwback to an old Buster Keaton silent movie - without the laughs.

Don't waste your time. Instead, go watch one of Danny's classic comedies, like "The Court Jester" or "Wonder Man".

But the results are still entertaining and often quite funny, despite both the director's and the star's bizarre refusal to play up to their strengths. Overall it's far from the worst Danny Kaye movie, though not remotely in the same league as the Court Jester.

There are no musical sequences here and there is minimal wordplay. The former can be excused since this is a pure farce; it depends on structure and escalating plot devices for its humor and songs would just slow it down. The latter is more regrettable; Kaye seems a bit morose here, and his depiction of an overly nervous office worker is almost stressful just to watch. He only really comes to life in the masseuse sequence and the frenetic climax. (Both very entertaining sequences that make the film worthwhile). It's too bad that the film is padded out with fairly unpleasant scenes with the gangster character, who seems to have about an equal amount of screen time as Kaye.

I think this is the first black and white Frank Tashlin film I've seen, and it's probably one of the only ones. One of Tashlin's greatest skills was his use of vibrant color, which is absent here (lower budget, probably). The photography is still quite professional though, and miles above some of Kaye's other color films such as On the Double. Luckily Tashlin's penchant for lowbrow satire is still in full force though, especially in the ridiculous 'modern' gym and the mechanized credit card company. It plays very well into his pet topics: the usurpation of man by machine, the ridiculousness of progress, etc, and it's all aged rather well. ("You're using that evil money?" someone asks Kaye's character at some point, since he works for a credit card company. Hmm, we may really be heading for that society). Another Tashlin trademark, the climactic cartoonish chase scene, has lots of good gags though it can't really compare with his work on 'Son of Paleface'.

The writer, Bill Blatty, would become famous a decade later for writing the Exorcist, but before that most people don't know that he mainly worked in comedy films, especially with Blake Edwards. The Man From the Diner's Club is actually a lot like a Blake Edwards film in some respects, with its often bizarre humor, some of which, yes, revolves around beatniks.

This is Danny Kaye's last starring comedy, and like the last films of many comedians, it is quite sad. Frank Tashlin's film is much better suited to someone like Jerry Lewis. Kaye is completely out of place in the film. The true scene stealer of this film is Telly Savalas. In this film, Kojak has hair and plays the villain. And what a fine villain he is! But where are the musical specialties for Kaye? There is not one. Kaye was a comedian who depended on facial expressions, funny sounds, and musical patter. Here, he is expected to be a slapstick comedian. "On the Double", Kaye's previous film is a masterpiece next to this.

This film represents the lasts starring theatrical film made by Danny Kaye. Soon, he'd make his mark on TV--with his popular show and a few assorted television movies. And, because it's the last, you'd hope it would be among his best...which it isn't. Is it worth seeing? Read on...

Danny plays a schnook named Ernest Klenk and pretty much everything he does ends up exploding or breaking. It's a shame, as he wants to marry his long-time girlfriend but just when he things he's got enough money and job security to make a go of it, something stupid happens and the wedding is postponed. There also is an evil gangster (Telly Savalas) who wants to fake his own death--and guess who has a weird anomaly which would make him the perfect candidate to murder in place of the gangster?

If you are used to seeing Danny Kaye singing, dancing and doing comedy, you may be in for a little shock. There's no singing nor dancing and the sort of comedy he does is nothing much like the usual Danny Kaye humor. In many ways, it really reminds me of a Jerry Lewis film from the same era--where the leading man is a screw-up, there are lots of sight gags and the comic mugs A LOT for the camera. A great example of this are the scenes where Kaye is around computers--where he twitches and gesticulates like he's having some sort of seizure. Funny? Not in the least. And, after seeing it, I can see why he stuck to television.