Like a Spanish-inflected version of Pagnol, The Rocket from Calabuch drops us into a seaside town, rich with warm-hearted, quirky, and tender inhabitants. A physicist, nicknamed Jorge (Edmund Gwenn), goes on the lam from his A-bomb building duties and arrives in Calabuch seeking refuge from the unnerving nuclear age. Mistaken for an itinerant tramp, the townspeople take him in and soon he is an indispensable member of the community. Again, Berlanga treats us to a panoply of peculiar folks, all in need of Jorge's world-weary wisdom. When the annual fiesta arrives with its fireworks display, our disenchanted physicist finds joy in his pyrotechnical abilities. Ironically, he's the bomb.