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plays a life insurance salesman who sells a policy to Jesse James and spends the whole film trying to get it back and rescinded.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.
