Bananas

When Horatio Pemberton, a nine-million-dollar American yachtsman, stops at the tiny Central American port of Puerto Cerdo for a simple bunch of bananas, he gets far more than his dollar’s worth. A bureaucratic shake-down over landing papers soon escalates into a confrontation with the bombastic military dictator General Rapaz Fulano de Tal, who eyes Pemberton’s daughter with unsettling interest. After grudgingly paying a hefty “fine,” the party returns to the yacht only to find it buried under tons of ripe fruit—the literal delivery of a dollar’s worth of bananas in a land where the yellow stuff has no commercial value.

What begins as a hilarious clash of cultures turns into a battle of wits and firepower when the dictator’s “navy” arrives to enforce a preposterous garbage-removal law. With a makeshift cannon, a monkey-wrench, and plenty of Yankee grit, the vacationers fight back against tyranny, sparking a revolution in the process. This sharp-witted satire of banana-republic politics and capitalist absurdity delivers nonstop comic adventure on the high seas.