Cinema: Not in the Cards

The Man from the Diners' Club. The

Los Angeles headquarters of the Diners' Club is a dreadful place to work. A boiler factory of computers goes thunk-thunk-think and lights up like the Scoreboard at a hockey match. And in a little room by itself squats the Master Card File, bristling with millions of index cards mounted on wheels.

Into this room, when everybody else is outside the employees' entrance drinking coffee, tiptoes Clerk Danny Kaye. He has okayed the membership application of a tax-rapped mobster, and he has got to retrieve the card from the Master File before it is mailed out. First the buttons: thack-thack; then the lever: slank. The wheels begin to turn: whumble-whumble-whee. But instead of surrendering the card, the omnivorous machine snaps at Danny's black knit tie and starts dragging him into its transistorized innards. Like a hooked tarpon, Danny runs with the line, is reeled back in, leaps, dives, tail-walks, snaps free just as he is coming to gaff. In disgust, the Master File starts spitting application cards at him until the room is ankle deep in a paper blizzard, with drifts backing up against the chilly air-conditioning ducts.

Unfortunately, after this mad beginning The Man slows down to a walk. Worse yet, TV's Telly Savalas (The Untouchables, The Witness), cast to type as the card-carrying hoodlum, almost succeeds in heisting the show from Danny when in the last reel, Telly—on the Diners' Club—rents Avis Fords, gladiolus bouquets, peony-print bridesmaids' outfits, redheaded office girls, and messengers on bicycles to stage a gangland wedding getaway. Danny Kaye does not even have a git-gat-gittle patter song to reassure audiences that they are watching him and not Jerry Lewis. What's more he seems to know that there is something fishy about his getting caught in this eat-now-pay-later bouillabaisse.