Best movies like When Banana Ruled

Using edited archive footage, mockery is made of Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini.

In a banana republic, way south of the Texas border, a dumb-Dora American girl, Norma (Olive Borden), lets her ruby-red lips promise more than she is willing to deliver, and she finds herself a prisoner in a notorious dance-hall/brothel. But her American aviator boyfriend, Barry Blake (John Boles), is flying to her rescue. He does just that but, alas, they are quickly captured by a gang of outlaws. Possibly the many expensive pieces of jewelry she has gathered from the many male friends she has made along the way, including El Presidente, captured the outlaws' attention.

Set both in Latin America and the United States, the film explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. Pilger says that the film "...tells a universal story... analysing and revealing, through vivid testimony, the story of great power behind its venerable myths. It allows us to understand the true nature of the so-called "war on terror". According to Pilger, the film’s message is that the greed and power of empire is not invincible and that people power is always the "seed beneath the snow".

In 1996, electric cars began to appear on roads all over California. They were quiet and fast, produced no exhaust, and ran without gasoline... Ten years later, these cars were destroyed.

In 1988, Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, due to international pressure, is forced to call a plebiscite on his presidency. The country will vote ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to Pinochet extending his rule for another eight years. Opposition leaders for the ‘No’ vote persuade a brash young advertising executive, René Saavedra, to spearhead their campaign. Against all odds, with scant resources and while under scrutiny by the despot’s minions, Saavedra and his team devise an audacious plan to win the election and set Chile free.

The world's newest kung fu legend, Joe Lewis, takes on evil gangsters and saves the world.

Competition among fruit growers takes a nasty turn when the main buyer offers unrealistically low prices for their crops.

When a bumbling New Yorker is dumped by his activist girlfriend, he travels to a tiny Latin American nation and becomes involved in its latest rebellion.

Michael Moore comes home to the issue he's been examining throughout his career: the disastrous impact of corporate dominance on the everyday lives of Americans (and by default, the rest of the world).

An American doctor gets caught in the middle of a revolution when he's forced to operate on a South American dictator.

Danton and Robespierre were close friends and fought together in the French Revolution, but by 1793 Robespierre was France's ruler, determined to wipe out opposition with a series of mass executions that became known as the Reign of Terror. Danton, well known as a spokesman of the people, had been living in relative solitude in the French countryside, but he returned to Paris to challenge Robespierre's violent rule and call for the people to demand their rights. Robespierre, however, could not accept such a challenge, even from a friend and colleague, and he blocked out a plan for the capture and execution of Danton and his allies.

Two Marine pilots in love with the same girl are assigned a mission to find a notorious bandit in Nicaragua. This early talkie from director Frank Capra, released in 1929, stars Jack Holt, Ralph Graves and Lila Lee.

The true story of how Ray Kroc, a salesman from Illinois, met Mac and Dick McDonald, who were running a burger operation in 1950s Southern California. Kroc was impressed by the brothers’ speedy system of making the food and saw franchise potential. He maneuvered himself into a position to be able to pull the company from the brothers and create a billion-dollar empire.

Once upon a time... consumer goods were built to last. Then, in the 1920’s, a group of businessmen realized that the longer their product lasted, the less money they made, thus Planned Obsolescence was born, and manufacturers have been engineering products to fail ever since. Combining investigative research and rare archive footage with analysis by those working on ways to save both the economy and the environment, this documentary charts the creation of ‘engineering to fail’, its rise to prominence and its recent fall from grace.

A corrupt General plans on smuggling one million US dollars out of the Banana Republic he dominates. Local revolutionaries plan on stealing the cash but are thwarted when a bandit leader they are working with double crosses them. A tough cop and her boyfriend help two of the female revolutionaries escape from prison hoping that they will lead them to the cash, which they plan on keeping for themselves.

Women (Shirley Jones, Stella Stevens) and his mother help an English constable (James Booth) rise to ruler of a banana republic.

Using the interrogation of a US counterinsurgency agent as a backdrop, the film explores the consequences of the struggle between Uruguay's government and the leftist Tupamaro guerrillas.

A Central American plantation manager and his boss battle over a traveling showgirl.

On the lam from the New York Police because of a false murder charge, playboy Brooke Travers escapes to a Central American banana republic.

A headstrong young girl in Afghanistan, ruled by the Taliban, disguises herself as a boy in order to provide for her family.

After the relatively low box office takings of 'Intolerance', D. W. Griffith would revisit his epic film three years later by releasing two of the film's interlocking stories as standalone features, with some new additional footage. The second of these was 'The Mother and the Law', which demonstrates how crime, moral puritanism, and conflicts between ruthless capitalists and striking workers help ruin the lives of marginal Americans.

The Laguna Dam is to be built in Arizona to supply water to desert-land unfit for cultivation or stock-raising. Rival companies bid for the building contract, which leads to violence and danger for Bob Owen and his dog Satan.

Jim Conway, who works on a South American rubber plantation, leaves to meet a girl from the United States whom he is to marry. But he receives a telegram from her telling him she has married someone else. He goes to a waterfront café where he meets a singer, Joan Madison, and tells her his troubles. He asks her to marry him and return to the plantation with him using the name of the girl he was to marry. This strikes her as a great idea as she is a wanted fugitive.

When two showgirls decide to leave South America and head for home, they sweet talk the purser of a clipper ship into giving them berths. In the course of the voyage, a band of thieves attempts to take over the ship and make off with its cash cargo. The heroic purser has other ideas and weighs in to save the day.

A respected war correspondent is found murdered, with three bullets--from three different guns--in him. Three different men are arrested, convicted and sentenced to death for the murder, but only one can be the actual killer. A criminologist sets out to find who is really guilty.

A young woman runs away from an abusive home and pre-arranged marriage only to be frustrated in her attempts to find happiness with a handsome engineer.

A priest secretly leads rebels in their struggle against the corrupt military dictatorship of the Central American country of Puerto Santo.

Desperate to change her vixenish image, Theda Bara was called upon to play a sweet young thing (she was nearly 30) who sacrifices herself for the happiness of her sister (Claire Whitney).

Civil servant Adrien Courtois comes to Paris in order to make his money bear fruits.

Doug is an American mining engineer. Pres. Valdez of Paragonia wants him to reopen the country's mines. Doug is not interested ... until he sees the President's beautiful daughter, Juana. Valdez returns to Paragonia, but is deposed by Generals Sanchez and Garcia and locked in San Mateo Prison. The Americano arrives...

A guide to human history through its most audacious power grabs. From Julius Caesar to Napoleon; from Mussolini to the strongmen of the present day - we see how the world we know has been shaped by those who dream big.

They’ve become the human face of inhuman barbarity. Leaders like Hitler, Idi Amin Dada, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, Bokassa, Muammar Kadhafi, Khomeini, Mussolini and Franco governed their countries completely cut off from reality. These paranoid leaders were driven to abuse their power by the pathology of power itself. Dictators are driven by a relentless, thought-out determination to impose themselves as infallible, all-knowing and all-powerful beings. But they are also men ruled by their caprices, uncontrollable impulses, and reckless fits of frenzy, which paradoxically render them as human as anyone else. The abuses they committed were clearly atrocious, yet some of them were as outlandish as the characters portrayed in the film The Dictator. They sunk to depths worthy of Kafka: so incredibly absurd, they are outrageously funny.

Musical comedy telling the hilarious story of greengrocer Albert Speed’s (Albert Burdon) adventures with would-be revolutionaries in a mythical South American banana republic. He becomes mistaken for a gun-runner, and problems arise when Albert begins using the names of vegetables as code words for weapons and ammunition that they are smuggling! Albert saves not only his own skin, but also those of the Presidente and his attractive daughter.

When his beloved gas station closes and his wife, Xaviera, throws him out of the house, Henry Dodd, a simple honest young man gets a job as TV spokesman for Rex Madden, a macho tycoon, and his questionable enterprises. Henry falls in love with Bonnie, a feisty woman who encourages him to follow his dream far away from the advertising campaigns that have made the tycoon a fortune. Enraged, Rex deceptively separates the two lovers, tries to teach Henry the rules of machismo, and transform him into a "Real Man". But...Bonnie is a force to be reckoned with and determined to get her man back. Can she return before Henry is destroyed, or will he become a card-carrying member of the "HeMan-HateWoman" club? The battle for Henry's soul is played out in televised ad campaigns and in the corporate boardroom, until Henry finally realizes what it is to be a "Real Man".