The Mouse That Roared

The British probably could have made an excellent film out of The Mouse That Roared; Columbia pictures and Director Jack Arnold have made a good one. A frothy comedy about a diminutive principality in Alpine Europe--the Duchy of Grand Fenwick--the film is good satire on the American military, world diplomacy, and the arms race.

Based on a novel by Leonard Wibberly (which I haven't read but have been informed is "deeper" than the movie) The Mouse tells the story of how Grand Fenwick--its economy threatened by an imitation American wine that drives its own product off the U.S. market--plots to make war on America, lose, and, as is customary with vanquished U.S. foes, be economically rehabilitated. The triad of hereditary rulers who run Grand Fenwick--creaking and Victorianesque Grand Duchess Glorianna, imperious Prime Minister Montjoy, and meek but good Tully Bascomb, a combination game warden and defense minister--are all played skillfully by Peter Sellers.

Sellers qua Montjoy proposes war; Sellers qua Glorianna consents to it; and Sellers qua Tully Bascomb leads an expeditionary force of twenty men clad in mail and armed with crossbows, to New York, where they are to surrender. They arrive on the day of a mass air raid drill, and by chance reach a laboratory where the prototype of the devastating Q bomb has just been completed.

Bascomb captures the bomb, its inventor (David Kasoff) and his daughter (Jean Seberg), four policemen and a blustery, obtuse General. Unfortunately, the real bomb in the film is Miss Seberg, who though fetching, cannot act--even when one concedes that her part is largely a spoof on the Hollywood heroine type. After losing his heart to Miss Seberg and his insides to the Atlantic, Bascomb returns to Grand Fenwick as unwelcome victor.

Wooed by all nations, because of the power it holds with the working model of a bomb that can blow up all Europe, Grand Fenwick finally negotiates the capitulation of the U.S. Fenwickian wine gets a fair break in U.S. markets; Grand Fenwick keeps the bomb in cooperation with other small neutrals to prevent a great-power war; and Tully gets the girl.

The strength of the film lies in its patchwork humor: rock 'n' roll in an air raid shelter, the Fenwickian girls waiting for the victorious American soldiers with signs, such as "Gum Chum," and Big Four ministers playing the board game "Diplomacy." What mars the film, apart from acting flaws, is chiefly an over-reliance on corn and gag lines, like Miss Seberg's "I always thought you were a snake, you snake." If the script is supposed to be satire on the usual Hollywood cliches, it does not come off as such, but sounds merely trite itself.

As for the political ideas injected into the film, they sound out of place among the jokes. Moreover, there is small guarantee that little countries would be much better guardians of supernuclear power than big countries; if the world's nuclear weapons were buried in Lichtenstein, there soon would be few Lichtensteiners for all the foreign agents.

Late in the film the directors flash a Q-bomb explosion on the screen and then announce, "this is not really the end of our picture." A film like The Mouse That Roars is encouraging, for without this ability to laugh at our insane weaponry, such a finale might be worth contemplating.