The Man From the Diner’s Club Reviews

At the Cinema With Colin Bennett
“Mr. Kaye Can Still Raise a Laugh”
The Age – January 4, 1964
By: Colin Bennett

            They say Danny Kaye is passé as a comedian. They say his rightful place as an amiable satirist is the Sam Goldwyn 1940s, when everything was in Technicolor, innocence always won through and the girl next door turned out to be Virginia Mayo. Setting aside the question of who “they” are and why they feel this way, I only know that Danny made me laugh a great deal last week as The Man From The Diner’s Club.

           Screening at the Grosvenor, this is a comedy of Frank Tashlin, the director who works with Jerry Lewis. Therefore it is a comedy of isolated bits and pieces, erratic in construction, with its characterization sometimes out of control, but very strong and inventive in its visual gags.

           Danny, his lean, collie-dog face a little older and more lined, works like a dervish—flailing, twitching, flustering and bounding—and earns all his laughs. He plays a dithering employee of the Diner’s Club who issues credit cards to impossible applicants, including a famous gangster (Telly Savalos). His job, and his coming marriage, depend on retrieving the card; and to make matters worse, the gangster needs a corpse quickly and Danny is just the corpse he needs.

           The Kaye character is not consistent: it runs a little wild. I have always felt his best chance to develop a great clown lay with his vocal and facial miming. His hands and feet are clumsy; their sole use for laughter is their clumsiness. His voice and face must make up the leeway. His chief talent has been the diversity of his talents, the lightening  changes of masquerade, and his best vehicle is the one encompassing as many of these talents as possible, for only when set free on a stage is he totally unconfined and happy.

           In Danny Kaye’s last really good films such as The Court Jester, currently being revived, he seemed to be sensing and perfecting a screen character. This fellow was timeless enough—not too modish to become outmoded. He was the fellow who gets himself into straits with society purely through his inability to explain illogical happenings to his logical, ordered, everyday world. It was the man-in-the-street’s inability to run mad. A Walter Mitty character, if you like: a dreamer who can only clown or sing or gibber his way out when he cannot explain; who can escape a certain time and distance but never for ever—only until the plot inevitably twists his way in the last reel.

           Danny was the helpless buffoon who, in a ticklish situation, took great advantage of his ability to be a buffoon. He was desperate, perhaps, but he knew somehow that the cards were stacked his way for the last hand. For he was also the incurable optimist. That was the thing about him we liked so much.

           Succeeding films have not followed through this characterization. The Man From The Diner’s Club tries spasmodically, but Mr. Tashlin is too absorbed with individual bits of business to pay real attention to the creation of a clown.

           Failing this, however, I found plenty to enjoy in the picture: Danny’s by-play with an enormously long necktie, his caricatures—a punch-drunk boxer, a German masseur—a pill-swallowing scene, and the slowest double-take in history . . . also Cara Williams as the gangster’s inebriated moll; and Mr. Tashlin’s special contributions, a berserk computer, a dumb-waiter and a climactic chase in a gymnasium which the director, a former cartoonist, has modeled directly on a Tom and Jerry cartoon. These seem to me good and sufficient reason for making the film.

[The rest of the review did not pertain to Danny’s movie and was omitted]

- Home -