The Dictator
Summary
A velvet-clad Manhattanite, Brooke Travers, steps from Fifth-Avenue snow into a hansom that ferries him not to a yacht but to a moral abyss: one curbstone concussion later, the golden boy is a fugitive, trading tailcoats for tin-pot regalia on a fever-coast where revolutions ferment like sour rum. In Porto Banos, a burned-out consul slips the naïf a seal of office as casually as lighting a cigarette; overnight, drawing-room wit becomes the de facto autocrat of a nation whose maps are sketched in coup ink. Insurgent machetes flash, the consul’s wife brandishes matrimonial blackmail, a discarded mistress sharpens vendetta to stiletto fineness, and a missionary’s hymnal eyes convert the cynic faster than any bullet. The film pirouettes from slapstick exodus to tropical operetta—palace balconies wobble, banana trains explode, moonlit duels cross-cut with flirtations over communion wine—until Travers, stripped of every alibi privilege ever bought him, bargains his counterfeit power for authentic love and sails into the gulf’s sunrise, a penitent monarch of nothing but his own reclaimed pulse.
Synopsis
Brooke Travers, a young society man of a roving disposition and much leisure, gets into a cab with his valet and his trunks, to go to his yacht for a cruise. Arriving at the pier, the cabman demands an exorbitant charge for his fare, and, upon Travers resenting the charge, he is again soaked by the cabman, this time with his capable fists. Travers strikes back, and the cabman falls, his head hitting a curbstone. The ambulance surgeon arrives, pronounces the man dying, and advises Travers to flee. Taking the advice and the cab, Travers and his valet hasten for another wharf, and take ship for Central America. As they are landing at the little port of Porto Banos, the consul of that place, who is also an instigator of revolutions, offers to let Travers take his credentials and pose as Dictator in his place, pretending to be afraid of the yellow fever, but really because he has learned of a new revolution, and is afraid of his life. Travers, fearing the law is already on his track, eagerly accepts the offer, and goes ashore as the new Dictator. Then things happen with marvelous celerity, and Travers becomes the center of a small cyclone of trouble, the chief factors of which are the opposing faction of the revolution, the wife of the consul, a vengeful former sweetheart of the latter, and a pretty young missionary, with whom Travers has fallen desperately in love. How he finally comes unscathed from his many perils, and wins his lady love, form an interesting denouement.
