[3] Produced in part by Peter Lawford, Johnny Cool features a cast that also includes Mort Sahl, Telly Savalas, Jim Backus, Joey Bishop, and Sammy Davis Jr., who also sings the theme song.

Johnny Colini, an exiled American living in Rome, rescues Salvatore Giordano, a young Sicilian outlaw, from the police.

After Giordano is groomed, polished, and renamed "Johnny Cool", Colini sends him on a mission of vengeance to the United States to assassinate the men who plotted his downfall and enforced exile.

Meanwhile, he picks up Darien "Dare" Guinness, a wealthy divorcée who becomes his accomplice, she is later severely beaten by the gangsters as a warning to Johnny against pursuing his vendetta.

[5] Allmusic's Steven McDonald noted "This soundtrack manages to mix the early '60s caper-flick brand of jazz with the darker feel of 1950s film noir – a genre to which Johnny Cool was a deliberate throwback.