THE FOREIGNER
In this version the hapless sad sack is Charlie Baker, who has been brought to a resort in Tilghman County, Georgia, by his RAF buddy “Froggy” LeSueur, who’s there on a three-day training assignment at the nearby military installation. Charlie Baker is painfully shy, paralytically inarticulate, and as devoid of personality as a golf ball. The thought of having to interact socially with the resort’s other guests so terrifies him that Froggy attempts to relieve him of his conversational duties by introducing him to the proprietress, Betty Meeks, as a foreigner who speaks no English. As it turns out, this ruse makes Charlie a witness to a plot, masterminded by the Reverend David Lee and county inspector Owen Musser, to seize the widow Meeks’s property and turn it into a headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan. Furthermore, the Reverend Lee intends to acquire the funds to finance this project by marrying an heiress, Catherine Simms, and having her mildly retarded brother, Ellard, declared unfit to manage his part of the inheritance.
