The film's music is composed and produced by Quincy Jones, and the soundtrack features performances by the Don Elliott Voices, Little Richard, Roberta Flack and Doug Kershaw.

These include a Las Vegas mobster as well as a ruthless drug smuggler known as the Candy Man and a crooked overbearing U.S. Army sergeant, the Sarge and his meek-mannered partner the Major, who conspire on a big heroin and LSD smuggling score.

Joe Collins (Warren Beatty), an American bank security consultant, has been spying on them and makes mysterious and elaborate preparations to steal their money (totaling more than $1.5 million) with the help of Dawn Divine (Goldie Hawn), a hooker with a heart of gold since the Las Vegas mobster and the Sarge are her clients.

The club owner is the boss of a drug smuggling mob who asks the Candy Man to deliver two bottles of a concentrated solution of LSD to Copenhagen.

The bank is closed and evacuated while Collins uses duplicate keys to empty the criminals' three safe deposit boxes into Dawn's large-size deposit box, using a special stopwatch he ordered to exactly avoid the CCTV cameras that he supervised their installation before (It is implied that Collins had obtained the necessary bank information and secretly copied the criminals' keys while they were engaged in sexual trysts with Divine.)

The next day, the three criminals, one by one, discover that their boxes are empty, and thus they cannot complete their illegal schemes, nor do they dare to go to the police to report the thefts, since they would then risk revealing their own dishonest pasts.

The three men join forces and search Dawn Divine's apartment, as she was their common link, and find clues that connect her to Collins and to the Las Vegas mobster thus confirming the Candy Man's theory.

An epilogue shows Divine staying at the Hotel del Coronado, joyfully driving a gleaming new yellow Corvette, and cuddling in bed with an unseen someone.

[1] Other filming locations included Munich, Norway, the Pacific Coast Highway and the Hotel Del Coronado near San Diego, California.

The soundtrack to the film was composed and produced by Quincy Jones, with performances by Little Richard, Roberta Flack and Doug Kershaw, in addition to featuring the Don Elliot Voices throughout the score.

Among Jones' bouncy, funky instrumental songs, his track "Snow Creatures" has been heavily sampled by numerous hip hop artists, including Gang Starr and Common.

Its considerable pleasure is that it sets us up solidly in a colorful, unfamiliar but unquestionably real place — Hamburg, Germany — and plays its ingenious charades absolutely as if they were part of the teeming life of that city.

"[6] A Channel 4 review of the film in the UK gave it a 4 out of 5 rating, and, like Ebert, noted the pace of the directing and script by Brooks, describing it as "cutting more rapidly than usual, he kept the action moving fairly entertainingly for most of the movie, with includes a long and spectacular car chase".

[7] However, unlike Ebert, critic Christopher Null believed the film's script weakened at midpoint: "Beatty and Hawn carry this fun little heist/comedy picture for the first hour, but then the whole affair gets a little tiring".