A quick summary: I think the plots of most Three Stooges movies are more realistic than this mess.
In Binghamton's office, he hears some noise and sees two boys standing at a machine gun anchored inside a Jeep a bit outside his window. Standing right next to the Jeep is Ensign Parker. Binghamton orders Parker to get the boys away from the Jeep. He does, and then proceeds to think he needs to explain to them why they can't be near the big machine gun. As he has done dozens of times, he starts talking about how the safety is on, but if you move this lever...and Parker starts firing the machine gun. As is normally the case, he can't figure out how to release the trigger quickly, but always is able to change the upward angle the gun is point in, to where it is shooting straight out, making it much more of a danger than it would otherwise be if he just kept it pointed up.
After he strafes all along Binghamton's office building, we cut to see what is happening inside. Binghamton knows someone is shooting at him, and he tries to hide under his desk. He conks his head and passes out when he sees a red liquid over the part of his shirt where his heart would be, unaware that it is just his wife's strawberry preserves he was enjoying. Carpenter comes in and he sees the red spot and doesn't notice there is no hole in the clothing, nor that it doesn't quite look like blood, and assumes the captain has been killed.
Carpenter goes to the window, sees Parker standing at the machine gun, and starts yelling for the MPs because the captain has been murdered. Interestingly enough (as Vin Scully would say) all the shooting did nothing to arouse the MPs, but they did come running right away when Elroy yelled for them.
But wait, it gets worse. Parker figures if he killed the captain, he has to take it on the lamb-sort of like the hit series The Fugitive. I think the Get Smart parody of that series was much more enjoyable than this one. Parker, on foot, is able to elude all the MPs in town, who apparently don't even have one motorcycle or Jeep or anything to chase him when he is seen riding a boy's bicycle (after quickly paying the kid an undisclosed sum) on a dirt road leading out of town.
Parker finds a swimming hole where a man is singing and swimming, with his clothes on the shore and decides to swap his clothes with that man. This leads to the ludicrous scene where the MPs bring in this bearded man with an earring to Binghamton's office, saying they have caught Ensign Parker, just because the man is wearing the ensign's uniform.
McHale is there and he talks to the man in Italian, and purposely, incorrectly tells the captain that the clothes were stolen at a spot 10 kilometers south of town. Now we would expect that Binghamton would never trust McHale to give the true location of Parker, so I expected him to say, "McHale, if you say he's south, I will go north." He doesn't, giving McHale a better chance of finding him first.
The clothes are those of a gypsy and Parker tries to hide in their camp, but the leader is influenced by a reward post Binghamton put up, offering 10,000 lire for Parker, "Dead or Alive." For reasons that make no sense, the reward posters being put up all around town are all in English only. Recognizing him from the picture on the poster, the gypsy tries to hold him, but Parker runs away, somehow faster than all the gypsy men in the camp-another unbelievable thing in this show.
McHale and men are in a Jeep as Parker is escaping and they are able to pick him up without the gypsies able to catch him, even though they were right behind him. They take him to their wine cellar and have Chuck man the periscope they use to see if anyone (Binghamton) is coming up on their hideout. Of course, Binghamton, by himself, is walking along and he spots the periscope. He is standing close enough to it to kiss it, almost, as Parker spins it around and spots him. He quickly lowers it, and Binghamton leans over-stupidly, so that when Parker raises it back up to show the skip, he conks Binghamton on the chin, again knocking him out.
Believe it or not, it gets worse yet. McHale's next scheme is to stage a scene to make it look like Parker saves Binghamton's life, so he'll drop all charges. They put Binghamton on the 73, tied him up and blindfold him, and somehow in a short period of time, come up with a mini-play with everyone having speaking roles, and sound effects too, to make Binghamton think he is on a German U-boat, that he is a prisoner along with Parker.
This does lead to the one funny line. As Parker is talking to blindfolded Binghamton, he says, "I'm tied up, blindfolded, and gagged." The captain asks, "how can you talk to me if you're gagged." Chuck responds, "It's not easy."
McHale, who played the role of the U-boat commander, did nothing to disguise his voice, simply spoke English with a German accent, as did the other men, with voices the captain should surely have recognized. In the playlet, they tell him they are going underwater, and somehow the captain doesn't realize he's not moving at all. Then they say the PT-73 is coming toward them, and after a couple of grenades are tossed outside, they say they are hit and are abandoning ship.
Parker says he freed himself and leads the captain off the "U-boat" onto a raft and after they paddle some distance-supposedly, they are picked up by the 73 and the captain is so happy Parker saved his life, he drops all charges. As they started to leave the "U-boat" Binghamton asks Parker why doesn't he untie him or at least remove the blindfold, but is told there is no time. Of course that's ridiculous, since Binghamton could move a lot faster if Parker would just take 3 seconds to whip off the blindfold.
I think by the third time Parker shot off a machine gun accidentally it had lost its humor. This is not knocking something off the captain's desk, or even Barney Fife shooting his pistol at the floor one time. Parker shoots off dozens of rounds while whirling the gun so that it points toward people. You'd think he'd learn not to handle the thing when he wants to tell civilians how to handle the thing. I think almost every time he shoots one of these by accident, he is talking to a civilian. Why doesn't he get some training sometime to keep him from actually killing someone?
It's like every time on The Beverly Hillbillies when Granny tried to teach Elly May how to cook. She'd lay out the ingredients and leave Elly alone in the kitchen. After dozens of totally ruined dishes, Granny never learned to stay with Elly while she cooked so she could help her do it right.
Almost every scene had things happening that were, at best, hard to believe. The MPs should have easily caught Parker while he was running around town on foot, or been able to catch him on his little bicycle. The gypsies should easily have overpowered him, or caught him when he ran away. I don't understand Binghamton going to McHale's base by himself when he almost always has Elroy with him-this would have prevented the whole bit about the U-boat because they wouldn't have knocked them both out. Just the way the captain got conked by the periscope didn't even make sense. If I saw a big periscope-and Binghamton recognized it as such-disappear into the ground, I wouldn't lean over to see where it went, I'd be looking around for some sort of opening to an underground room nearby.
Nobody being able to tell jam from blood in the early going was the dumbest. Not only would it look different-they weren't watching in black-and-white like we were-but it was a stain on his shirt, not something leaking from inside a bullet hole.
This was unfunny throughout, really with the exception of that one line. So I give it a 2.
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