The film is unusual in that it has no spoken dialogue, with the characters performing their roles entirely through dance and mime.

Kelly appears in all three stories, which feature leading dancers of the era, including Tommy Rall, Igor Youskevitch, Tamara Toumanova and Carol Haney.

The movie performed poorly at the box office, and it generally is regarded as an artistic as well as commercial failure.

The second segment, named after the nursery rhyme "Ring Around the Rosy" was based upon Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde,[4] and it is set to original music by André Previn, who is off-camera at the piano.

The bracelet originally is given by a husband (David Paltenghi) to his flirtatious and apparently unfaithful wife (Daphne Dale).

He in turn gives it to the femme fatale (Belita), only to have her present it to a crooner (Irving Davies) after his performance.

He gives the bracelet to a hatcheck girl (Diana Adams) She returns home to her boyfriend, a Marine (Kelly).

Coming out of a bar, he encounters a streetwalker (Tamara Toumanova) and dances with her, giving her the bracelet before walking off again.

It is a fantasy consisting of live action and Hanna-Barbera-directed cartoons set in the casbah of a Middle Eastern country.

Use is also made of the original themes of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade by the MGM music department team of adapter Roger Edens, conductor Johnny Green and orchestrator Conrad Salinger.

This concept caused apprehension at MGM, because "dance, particularly ballet, was then considered longhair at best, homosexual at worst."

[4][5] According to author Larry Swindell, the film "was effectively thrown away by MGM because it didn't know how to market it.

Crowther added that Kelly was "not a particularly imaginative choreographer...his story ideas are somewhat hackneyed and his dances are too elaborate."

"[8] Time's critic wrote that the Sinbad sequence indicated that "Hollywood just cannot bring itself to bring the art before the coarse,"[7] and New York Daily News critic Wanda Hale wrote that the film would have difficulty appealing to a wide audience and said that "since this arty experiment is out of his system, I hope [Kelly] will leave selection of his vehicles to MGM.

[4] Writing in the New York Times in 1977, dance critic Clive Barnes wrote that the film was Kelly "at his most pretentious and least convincing ... the choreography throughout is shallow and facile, and the long‐awaited cartoon segment little but a tiresome gimmick".