The Man From the Diner’s Club Reviews

For those wanting to read them, these are the not-so-good reviews.

"Cinema"
Time Magazine - May 3, 1963

The Man from the Diners' Club. Danny Kaye has got into the clutches of the Jerry Lewis people, and is forced to caper through a series of predictable sight gags with nary a line from Sylvia Fine to brighten the charade. An encounter with a Diners' Club electronic brain is Danny's best bit, but television's Telly Savalas as a murderous mobster almost hijacks the show with his menacing geniality.

"The Screen: A Slapstick Kaye In 'The Man From The Diner's Club'"
New York Times - April 18, 1963
By: Bosley Crowther

           CAN somebody kindly tell us whatever happened to Danny Kaye, that wonderfully versatile comedian who used to play in lots of movies a few years back?
            How vivid he was, how inventive, how clever at sparkling mimicry. And what a beautifully wide-eyed, ingenous and tender charm glowed in him. He was superb at subtle clowning. What could happened to him?
            The reason we raise the question is that a fellow named Danny Kaye who looks just like the original turned up yesterday in a wacky but routine slapstick called "The Man From the Diners' Club," which went into circulation in neighborhood theaters. But his acting in it is so disordered, so frantic without being droll, so completely devoid of invention and spontaneity that he did no more than remind us, somewhat sadly, of that other Danny Kaye and what a terrible thing television has done to comedy on the screen.
            Oh yes, once or twice in the course of a frenzied, formless account of how a clerk for the Diners' Club scrambles to get a credit card back from a man who the big boss has said shouldn't have it, this fellow comes fairly close to giving a fair imitation of the original Danny Kaye.
            Once, when he is forced by circumstances to pretend to be a masseur in a gym to escape recognition by one of his tough superiors, he whips out a juicy German accent and fiogs his customer with such audacity that you might think, for just a few moments, you were looking at "Knock on Wood" again.
            And there is also a scene in which this fellow finds himself in a beatnik poet's pad, crowded with long-haired intellectuals, that has the sparkle of vintage Kaye.
            But most of this reckless, rootless nonsense has our counterfeit comic racing around in ever widening circles, as though he were playing follow-the-leader with an invisible Jerry Lewis. For all of one reel in the picture (at least, it seems that long), he is hiding a drunken girl in a dumbwaiter, so his fiancée will not discover her, and then pounding up and down stairs in the building trying to recover her. What Mr. Kaye does in this picture could be done by any television clown.
            And what Martha Hyer as his fiancée, Cara Williams as that other girl, Telly Savalas as a gangster and Everett Sloane as the Diners' Club boss do in their respective impersonations is no doubt the best they can, what with Frank Tashlin's breakneck direction and a generally witless script.
            If the original Mr. Kaye should somewhere read this, we hope he will return and be forgiven.

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