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. He has made a down payment on the blueprints to a bank at Los Angeles International Airport, but needs to raise $85,000 to complete the purchase.
In Boston, he seduces and marries Inger Knudsen, the secretary of a wealthy elderly woman. Eli sends her to L.A. to set up housekeeping, on the pretext that a songwriter there is interested in his poetry. Meanwhile, he burgles another woman to get the final amount of money he needs. 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.
To keep her occupied, Eli sends Inger to take Polaroid snapshots around L.A., supposedly for a magazine article he is writing. Using costumes stolen from a movie studio, he and one of the gang masquerade as an Australian policeman escorting an extradited prisoner in order to get through airport security, while the other two dress as LAPD policemen to get into the bank, bypass the alarm, and get a bank employee to open the safe.
The gang pulls off the heist and makes a successful getaway to Mexico on a plane. Eli has no idea that Inger has been frantically trying to get in touch with him, because she has inherited $7 million from her former employer.
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.[2] Both men had worked extensively in television and wanted to get into features. The film was an original of Girard's. "I wouldn't so much call Eli Kotch a con man as a contemporary hero," said Girard. "He exploits a lot of people and breaks all the rules in order to enjoy himself, parlaying one job into another until even at the end, when he's ready to start all over again."[1]
At one stage Sidney J. Furie was announced as director and Tony Curtis was going to star.[3] However, Girard eventually directed the film and Curtis dropped out.
James Coburn signed to play the lead just before his breakout role in In Like Flint.[1][4]
Another working title was "The Big Noise".[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". Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round was later used as the title of a book of short stories written by Japanese author Haruki Murakami and first published in 1985.
Filming took place in early 1966.[1] The film was shot in Boston and Los Angeles, including at the Los Angeles International Airport.[5] The movie featured several Columbia contract players such as Nina Gray, Stephanie Hill and Harrison Ford.[1]
Recognition
Sparv was awarded a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer (female) in 1967, for her performance, by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.[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."[7]
Variety wrote "The idea and the premise... is okay but it doesn't jell, and the title, a deliberate attempt to be cute, is meaningless. 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."[8]
