This banal melodrama tees off with Mike Banning (Robert Wagner) hired as assistant golf pro at an exclusive country club in New Mexico. The film swings into a full course of complications, which includes unrequited love, seduction, blackmail, excessive drinking, gambling, adultery, and extortion. The characters and plot are stock soap opera, but the film is well made. The most interesting part involves a playoff of an illegal golf competition called a Calcutta, which Banning organizes to raise money for a blackmail debt he's forced to pay. The locations and upper middle class trappings are authentic enough, and the petty and/or alcoholic clashes among the golfers reveal characters whose lives are essentially barren off the course. The female characters, especially those played by Jill St. John and Anjanette Comer, are ridiculous but decorative, like the bright wallpaper and overdone Sixties hairdos. The dialogue never rises above such bromides as, "Good, you're greedy," "One romantic fantasy, coming up," and "So, you do have an automatic garbage disposal."
Review of Banning
