The Bank Bit

Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round just fills the space between a frisky title and a tricky TV-comedy ending, but doesn't fill it with any revels that require a viewer's complete attention. The movie's hero is a lickerish, hipsterish con artist named Kotch, played by James Coburn in a flaccid reprise of his role as Our Man Flint. In prison, Kotch cranks up a steal-a-million scheme, a testament to the faith of moviemakers that a tale so often told must be good for something--even if it is no longer good for laughs. After a cool blonde psychologist bounces him from a group therapy session behind bars to a bit of grope therapy in her bed, Kotch jumps parole, then hooks and crooks his way toward California.

Impersonating a cowpoke, he accompanies a corpse to Denver, presumably because that is a crazy way to go to Denver, man. He also pretends to be a Swiss shoe clerk, a termite exterminator and an Australian police inspector, meanwhile seducing a wealthy old woman's beautiful companion (Camilla Sparv), who really loves him for reasons never made clear in the script. He is characterized throughout as an alley cat so charmless that one sullied female can recall nothing about him more memorable than: "He wears a truss."

Kotch's lame-brain mission on the coast is to heist a bank at Los Angeles International Airport. His tiny task force bides time until all the security chaps for miles around are pooling sweat over the arrival of a Soviet Premier. Nothing goes off on schedule except the robbery itself, and that's a pittance, for it turns out that the hero might have got richer going straight.

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