Art direction was handled by Jack Martin Smith and Lyle R. Wheeler, costume design by Irene Sharaff and dance staging by Hermes Pan.

The film stars Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan, and gave Juliet Prowse her first speaking role in a feature.

In the Montmartre district of Paris, a dance known as the can-can, considered lewd, is performed nightly at the Bal du Paradis, a cabaret where Simone Pistache is both a dancer and the proprietor.

On a night when her lawyer and lover François Durnais brings his good friend chief magistrate Paul Barrière to the café, a raid is staged by police and Claudine and the other dancers are placed under arrest and brought before the court.

Visiting the café and pretending to be someone else in order to gain evidence, Philippe becomes acquainted with Simone and develops a romantic interest in her, but she is warned by Claudine that he is actually a judge.

Conspiring to sabotage the engagement, Paul arranges a party for the couple aboard a riverboat, during which François gets Simone drunk and encourages her to perform a bawdy routine in front of the upper-class guests.

In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther lamented the film's deviations from the musical play: "The music has been reduced to snatches, the book has been weirdly changed and the dances–well, they have been abandoned for some tired jigs ..." Crowther also panned the script and performances: "The story is also a downright foolish pastiche, cut to Frank Sinatra and Miss MacLaine, who look about as logical in Paris of the Eighteen Nineties as they would look on the Russian hockey team.

He, as a nonchalant young lawyer, and she, as the owner of a cabaret that is frequently being raided because they do the can-can there, behave, under Walter Lang's direction, as if they were companions in a Hoboken bar, slightly intoxicated and garrulous with gags.

She added: The characters in the film production are admirably handled by Shirley MacLaine, Frank Sinatra, the incomparable Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, Marcel Dalio and a new dancer named Juliet Prowse.

Juliet Prowse makes an auspicious debut as an actress-dancer, as she plays a role in the story and is a principal in the Garden of Eden ballet and a leader of the Can-Can chorus.

[6] Dick Williams of the Los Angeles Mirror called it "a racy, raucous show with its ups and downs, emerging as a mixture of TV spec, Broadway revue and movie musical.

"[7] A user of the Mae Tinee pseudonym in the Chicago Daily Tribune opened her remark by saying that "Shirley MacLaine is a girl who can light up a screen, even a giant size one, and when she's in action, this musical is a lively affair.

"[11] Myles Standish of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote: “CAN-CAN,” which is being offered with much ballyhoo at the AMBASSADOR THEATER, is something of a disappointment as an exposition of the gay life of a wicked Paris.

Consider: Metro having scored with turn-of-the-century Paris in “Gigi,” Twentieth Century-Fox takes two of its stars, Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan, the same period and Cole Porter’s stage musical.

Heaven knows, Abe Burrows' stage book was fairly dim but what Dorothy Kingsley and Charles Lederer have been paid to add is even less inspired.

Its most conspicuous quality is that inverse snobbism our West Coast gold-miners seem to find profitable with the masses: that judges and society folk are just snobs and that night club entertainers, crooked lawyers and others with no manners and bad speech are The Salt of the Earth."

He added: My major complaint is that the most has not been made of the material at hand, that it is ridiculous to have Chevalier around and not let him sing “I Love Paris” and that by having Miss MacLaine tear up a sketch by Toulouse-Lautrec does not necessarily suggest the period.

I yield to no one in enjoyment of Sinatra singing Porter but I infinitely preferred the neglected elegance of Messrs. Jourdan and Chevalier and the sinuous underworked Juliet Prowse.

"[14] Helen Bower wrote in the Detroit Free Press that "the madcap romance of Shirley MacLaine as the cafe proprietor with Frank Sinatra as her non-marrying lawyer gives these two stars great romp room for performances best suited to them.

[16] Harold Whitehead of the Montreal Gazette said that the "producer and director have taken what we have always felt was second rate Cole Porter and turned it into a first-rate motion picture production.

"[18] Clyde Gilmour of Maclean's magazine wrote: Cole Porter’s Broadway hit of a few seasons ago has been processed into a big noisy musical which is pleasant entertainment although several of its top numbers are lacking in zip and sparkle.