For a while, in A Piece of the Action, director Sidney Poitier seemed about to become Frank Capra reborn in the unlikely venue of bland, middle-of-the-road, caper-cum-comedy vehicles. But that film's agreeable mixture of improving sentiments and loose performance comedy now seems to have got lost in the stampede to repeat the box-office bonanza of Stir Crazy…. But Hanky Panky has not only forsaken the casualness that was so infectious about both those films, it doesn't even have a comedy pairing to carry its aggressive concoction of bad jokes, mistimed jokes and just plain non-jokes….

Some American reviews have suggested that this is a belly-laugh variation on [Alfred Hitchcock's] North by Northwest, though given its mystic vision of the Grand Canyon leading to a secret government testing ground, one might as reasonably say that it is Hitchcock as strained through [Steven Spielberg's] Close Encounters of the Third Kind...