American evangelist Jack Chick produced a lengthy series of cartoon booklets promoting his brand of Christianity, of which Operation Bucharest (No. 1 in the Crusaders series, 1974) was the first to be printed in full colour. Produced during the Cold War, its stereotyped depiction of the communist authorities’ attitude to Christianity might have felt plausible to its intended audience. The success of the series in promoting Christianity among the young has been attested to, however crude the message to a more dispassionate eye.
In winter-bound Romania, the ideological
climate as cold as the weather, a group of Christians meet in secret to avoid
persecution by the state, which is well aware of the massive impact
Christianity will have on their godless creed if people are able to hear about
it. They appear to be Protestants, much
like Chick, rather than the Orthodox Christians one would expect to find in Romania.
Unfortunately, they have been betrayed by
a Judas. They are arrested and
brutalised, and the last Bible in the area is seized. The remaining Christians need another copy,
but someone has to get it to them. A
couple of American Christians, dubbed The Crusaders, are enlisted in the US to
smuggle a microfilm of the holy book, translated into Romanian, into the
country where it will be used to print more copies at a secret location.
Timothy Clark and James Carter are the
unlikely partners. Timothy is a white
multilingual ex-Green Beret; James is black and streetwise, a former drug
dealer and militant (as if the two are synonymous) who saw the light in about
ten seconds when he met an elderly preacher who was not scared of him – it is noteworthy
how quickly a conversion can be effected in the most unlikely of circumstances
once the truth, of which the hearer had been unaware, is revealed.
James and Timothy are the epitome of
muscular Christianity, blending piety with an ability to get out of trouble, as
well as walking examples of the power of Christ to reach any heart, however
unlikely. Aside from the piety, they put
me in mind of The Pretenders, the TV
series starring the odd couple pairing of Roger Moore and Tony Curtis which
aired in 1971. The choice of James
Carter may have been judged unfortunate when Jimmy Carter became president in
1977.
Timothy happens to be the nephew of the
American ambassador in Paris, and Colonel Cherkov (which probably isn’t a play
on words) of the KGB, learning of the trip but not realising the purpose –
taking their stated reason as going on holiday at face value – hatches a plan
to ensnare him in a honey trap by deploying the beautiful agent Sofia, then embarrass
his uncle by making it look as though it was the uncle, not Timothy, who had committed
the indiscretion.
In terms of politics, the Russian KGB is
firmly in charge in Romania. There is no
mention of Ceaușescu or the Securitate and at one point Sofia says ‘What do you
think of our Russian soldiers?’ One gets
the impression Chick thought Romania was in the Soviet Union, but it is
reasonable to assume he did little background research. Why he chose Romania rather than another
Eastern Bloc country is unclear, as Christians might have been depicted as
having a hard time in any of them.
Perhaps he considered it to have a particularly brutal image.
The duo fly out to Paris and then travel
on to Bucharest by train with their precious microfilm. En
route, Cherkov’s goons try
to attack James to get him out of the way, but come off worse from their
encounter with the brother. Meanwhile,
the talented Sofia goes to work on Timothy, but while he clearly likes her, to
Cherkov’s increasing frustration he is disinclined to do anything that could be
turned into a scandal.
Worse, during one of these trysts Sofia
listens to Timothy quote scripture and she is promptly converted, along with
the cameraman who was set to record the grand seduction. Cherkov and his subordinate hear the
conversation recorded on film, but they are beyond redemption it seems, and are
not themselves converted. The colonel is
naturally furious at the failure of his plans; he would have been even more so had
he known about the microfilm.
Sofia is carted off to the Gulag (no news
of the cameraman), though as Chick tells us at the end, she may suffer now, but
she will be Saved, unlike the communists.
The film is safely delivered, and the Romanian Christians can print
their Bibles, a press and paper apparently not being an issue. They only have to wait 15 years for the
regime to disappear, and they can read it to their heart’s content without fear
of the door being kicked in.
For more on the Chick Tracts, see Peter
Laws’ article ‘The Terrifying World of Jack Chick’, Fortean Times, issue 389, February 2020, pp. 32-39.
