The movie was shot in 1966, but was not released for two years. It stars Dustin Hoffman in his first movie role, as Jason Fister, a young U.S. Treasury Dept. official sent to Rome to recover a large sum of money owed to the United States government by a deceased mobster.
The film is in the lowbrow comedy genre, with comic stop-action chase scenes, as well as many scenes involving spaghetti Western-style gunplay on the streets of Rome. Hoffman's Fister is a naive and mild-mannered bureaucrat with a sense for sniffing out phonies.
The interiors of the film were shot largely in Spain, with exteriors in Rome.