Trying to forget his marital problems, dull and doleful Charlie Baker takes a fishing-lodge holiday in the Deep South of America, and to avoid being pestered by the locals pretends that he is a foreigner who speaks no English. This leads him to becoming involved, at first unwillingly, in bizarre goings-on featuring a corrupt preacher, his pregnant girlfriend, her none-too-bright kid brother and the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan