Biggest Bomb Bang!!!

Ion Popescu-Gopo's A Bomb Was Stolen (S-a furat o bombă, 1962) would be the find of the festival if it played at an actual 'Thon. A deceptively lo-fi, black-and-white, dialogue-free doodle of nuclear anxiety, it was the live-action feature debut of its cartoonist-animator writer-director and it shows from the thesis statement of the nameless straight man played by Iurie Darie archetypally trying to pick a flower when he's chased off a nuclear test site by the ray guns of bucket-headed scientists whose military vehicles are polka-dotted like whale sharks, though the mushroom cloud which erupts in cathode-ray Droste effect is as scary as the real thing whose stock footage it is. Wandering the artificial streets of a city mashed up from American caricatures and Romanian economics, our dark-haired, lankily office-suited clown-hero folds the want ads of the paper over its atomically excited headlines just as obliviously as he stumbles onto the theft of the eponymous bomb—it looks like an enormous radish and its eerie heartbeat acts like radiation sickness—which shoved into his arms in an innocuous suitcase makes him the target of flamboyant gangsters and sinister authorities whom he evades in bewildered pirouettes of happenstance, his job-hunting knocked more immediately off course by his infatuation with the blonde bus conductor played by Eugenia Balaure whose no-nonsense sweetness is crystallized by her habit of playfully yet firmly breaking off the little white angel wings he moonily fantasizes onto her shoulders. Much of the film progresses in these amiable, inventive lazzi, accumulating until a pie fight is the only gag left unturned. The corporation which produced the bomb consults a supercomputer constituted of a cash register and a bubble-streaming brain in a jar. The gangsters frequent a basement den where a stripper peels by laundry line and their boss really doesn't like to be interrupted mid-tango. The hero gets the pants scared off him by a horror movie he can't afford a ticket to, the gurgles and shrieks of its soundtrack synched to the blood-curdling photo-comic of its lobby cards; he tumbles out of a dapper dream of his angelic bus conductor when someone opens the door he fell asleep against. Foiled in his initial efforts to return the suitcase to the criminals he aptly mistook for its lawful owners, he finds himself stuck with it like a bad joke no matter how often it's stolen or mislaid, irony-clad to boomerang back into his possession where in the finest tradition of the holy fool, his innocence of its contents seems to shield him from the dizziness it inflicts on its makers and thieves, but it remains an atomic MacGuffin and he cannot be protected from its nature forever. Fortunately for him and the rest of the ordinary citizens who have gathered fearfully around him in the deserted streets, the film's implicit argument about nuclear power vs. weapons of mass destruction can be solved with an optimism as boldly absurd as the paranoia that led up to it, snuffing an incipient explosion under a baseball cap so that the radish-finned bomb itself can be distributed in little, not even glowing bits among the pointedly multicultural crowd who use it to zoom stop-motion through the painted flats of their city and wrestle it back from the gangsters who would shoot it out of their guns; the last of it proliferates a pixilation of flowers through the dead field of the test site. It would be fun to see a print that wasn't so ground down with generation loss that at times it looks like Pixelvision, although the effect doesn't necessarily distract from the deadpan line-art weirdness of the film. It has overtones of Keaton, Tashlin, Tati, most of all its writer-director's self-described anti-Disney aesthetic in which the hazmat gear of the scientists still has the handles on the buckets. Since all marathon-related plans this year went down the storm drain the second our street started to look like the collapse of Larsen B, it was important for me to write about some science fiction. This bang brought to you by my biggest backers at Patreon.