Anthony Newley is a young electrician. He's an honest, beaten-down guy, except when he and his friends get on the Jazz Boat, an excursion liner for people who like to party. Then he and his pals like to talk a tough game. It's all for a laugh until Anne Aubrey walks onto the scene. She thinks he's a top safecracker, so she take him to see her boss, and he's caught in the middle of a nightmare.
It looks like a kitchen-sink sort of effort, with big-band numbers, Newley singing a ballad in character, shifting venues, Lionel Jeffreys in a straight turn as a violence-prone street cop, dance numbers that suggest WEST SIDE STORY, subplots that suggest film noir and AIP teenage-rebellion films .... and maybe that's the point: confusion. Newley wants more, but he doesn't know how to get it. He's a quiet nebbish, and his intended witticisms alway fall flat.
Maybe that was the intention, but the pace of the movie and the attention to the different points makes the forest invisible for the trees. It winds up being a scattergun effort, amusing, engaging perhaps, but never compelling.
