Con man Eli Kotch charms his way into a parole by playing on the emotions of a pretty psychologist, but drops her at the first opportunity to move around the country, romancing women and then stealing their possessions, or those of their employers.

Eli heads to Los Angeles, where he begins to assemble his gang for the bank robbery, which is timed to take place while the airport is distracted by the arrival of the Premier of the Soviet Union.

The film was announced in September 1964 as Eli Kotch and producer Carter de Haven and writer Bernard Girad set up a company, Crescent, at Columbia.

[5][1] The actual title used, Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round appears in the film as the novel being written by Coburn's character under the pseudonym of "Henry Silverstein".

[6] The Los Angeles Times felt the final segment where Coburn imitates an Australian "saves a picture that one is just about to write off as one of those ho hum sex things.

What leads up to the comedy-melodrama O. Henry finale most likely was very funny in the _ producers’ minds, but much of the action is so fragmentary and episodic that there is not sufficient exposition and the treatment goes overboard in striving for effect.