I really like Robert Wagner. In all sorts of things. Banning is, oddly enough, a golf movie, although it begins by being a kind of con-artist/seduction kind of thing. I quite enjoyed the con-artist/seduction part. The golf part is not that interesting.
The big golf showdown involves a kind of auction game where
someone bids on a team winning a large golf tournament. This is called a
Calcutta, and I've never heard of anything like it before. This kind of
thing was apparently widely understood by Banning's audience,
because the film itself takes no time to explain the rules. I had to
pause the movie in the middle and read up on golf Calcuttas.
Wagner is handsome and clever, and Guy Stockwell and James Farentino are, too. Jill St. John is totally delightful, but Anjanette Comer is legitimately terrible in this. I've never heard of her before, so perhaps she's terrible in everything? Who's to say.
This is an odd, sexy little film with a sleek script that I haven't seen available in many places. It was on my radar because the main song in the film was a) composed by Quincy Jones and b) nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar in 1968. I watched it through the Cave of Forgotten Films.
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