Gorgeous IRA operative Maria flees the British authorities and finds herself in Mexico, where she meets a stunning woman also named Maria, a singer in a traveling circus. The new friends start a vaudeville act — one that grows exponentially more popular after they incorporate striptease into their routine. When the singer Maria falls for a charismatic Mexican rebel, the girls leave the circus behind and recreate themselves as wild-eyed revolutionaries.

At the beginning of the 1913 Mexican Revolution, greedy bandit Juan Miranda and idealist John H. Mallory, an Irish Republican Army explosives expert on the lam from the British, fall in with a band of revolutionaries plotting to strike a national bank. When it turns out that the government has been using the bank as a hiding place for illegally detained political prisoners — who are freed by the blast — Miranda becomes a revolutionary hero against his will.