At an art exhibition he slips on a banana skin and, recovering, hears the ghosts of his ancestors suggesting he steals the imperial diamonds.

He assembles a team of female accomplices and posing as models they steal jewels by attaching them to carrier pigeons.

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Unswervingly vulgar and soporific comedy whose principal joke is the sexual fatigue that overwhelms the hero in his patriotic attempts to keep his lady accomplices happy.

The fantasy element is clumsily inserted (with great-grandfather's ghost looking remarkably like an extra from Ivan the Terrible (1944)), and N. F. Simpson's contribution to the script is discernible only in the accurately clichéd comments of the visitors to the Soviet exhibition and in the conversation of the elderly English Duke who boasts of having "slept through two World Wars".

Mastroianni seems as embarrassed by his slapstick gags as Rita Tushingham does by the combination of Liverpudlian kookiness and romantic initiative with which the script burdens her; and only Warren Mitchell as the perspiring Russian (quoting Marx dogmatically, but still crossing himself for luck) strikes the right farcical note.