Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Having spent a lot of time recently reading about wars and ethnic cleansings and listening to Mahler, I wanted some lighter fare and screened the 1959 "The Mouse That Roared," forgetting that, although a farce, the movie (and the novel by Leonard Wibberly on which it is based and which I read when my age was in single figures) centers on the risk of thermonuclear weapons (a "Q-bomb" the size and shape of a football, so that the viewer can be sure that it will eventually be tossed about). The opening premise is something of a satire of the Marshall Plan.

The tiny Alpine Grand Duchy of Fenwick had been moderately prosperous from exports of its wine to the United States. A California winery has dubbed its product Grand Enwick, sold its wine at a lower price, and bankrupted the Grand (all of 15 square miles) Duchy. The solution proposed by the hereditary Prime Minister, Count Mountjoy (Peter Sellers) and seconded by the head of the Loyal Opposition (Leo McKern) is to declare war on the US, since the US had been very generous in aiding Germany and Japan after defeating them.

The Grand Duchess Gloriana (Peter Sellers) doesn't want anyone to get hurt, but accedes to the scheme. Gamekeeper and hereditary Field Marshall Tully Bascom (Peter Sellers) is ordered to lead the army (of 20) in its medieval chain mail and with its weapons (longbows) in an invasion, transported on an old ship from Marseilles to New York (after the bus ride from the Grand Fenwick border to Marseilles).

The ship happens into the New York harbor during an air raid practice, so there is no one in customs or, indeed, on the streets of Manhattan. Trying to find someone to surrender to, Tully's merrie men arrive at the Nuclear Institute, where Professor Kokintz (David Kossoff), architect of the Q-bomb, and his daughter Helen (Jean Seberg) are defying the air-raid drill and are in his laboratory with the sensitive prototype bomb.

Tully seizes the bomb and the two, and adds a general and four of New York City policemen, returns to the boat... and discomfits the politicians by returning victorious! Possessing the bomb, Grand Fenwick is suddenly of interest to the rest of the world. In a time before the glorious triumph of conquering Grenada and of seizing former CIA agent Manuel Noriega in Panama (while managing to kill mostly opponents of his), the movie's Secretary of Defense (Austin Willis) thinks it would look bad for the mighty US military to invade a tiny nation. He goes to negotiate a peace, which everyone in Grand Fenwick except Tully is eager for.

Tully was smitten by the close-cropped (to my eyes boyish) Seberg at first sight. Reluctantly acceding to her father's demand, she had attempted to seduce him during the voyage, but between his continual sea-sickness and being semi-hypnotized by a lamp swinging in her cabin, she failed. That was mildly amusing. The second exposure of Seberg's shoulders to Sellers (as she bathes in a large cask) is boring and the ensuing romance unconvincing (and seemingly inserted from another movie!).

After Count Mountjoy and all the legislators resign and Tully becomes Prime Minister, he seizes the opportunity of possessing the ultimate bomb to instigate nuclear disarmament (the small nations inspecting the facilities of the larger ones). There is a sly finale, and the movie has some interest as a refection of the time. "The Mouse That Roared" lacks the bite of another movie that also has Peter Sellers in three roles, made five years later by Stanley Kubrick, "Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb").

Sellers three Fenwickian roles are quite differentiated (one of them being in dowager drag), but none of them has the inspiration of, say, "I'm Alright, Jack" or Sellers's Henry Kissinger burlesque, "Dr. Strangelove." There is not the sourness in Tully of the similarly clueless Sellers role in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, and Sellers was somewhat funnier as the clownish Inspector Clousseau. I am not much of a fan of Peter Sellers, regardless of how many roles he played in a movie. Margaret Rutherford was a better Grand Duchess in the sequel (The Mouse on the Moon) and Terry Sellers a better Count Mountjoy. And though Jean Seberg fit perfectly in Godard's "Breathless" (also released in 1959), even in a similar horizontal-striped long-sleeve t-shirt, she was simply a waste of screen time in "Mouse" -- and never much of an actress, especially not a light romantic comedy one, though later a martyr to FBI harassment in real life. Still, some of the blame for the failure of the romance to generate interest has to lie with the lines Helen and Tully was given. I doubt that anyone could have sold them!

Count Mountjoy--and taking on multiple parts--seems modeled on Alec Guiness (who took on seven in "Kind Hearts and Coronets" and Benjamin Disraeli in "The Mudlark"), but is inferior to the model (though Guiness was quite terrible in a similarly Ruritanian farce, "Hotel Paradiso," as was Sellers in "Waltz of the Toreadors"). The romance between the nebbish, bespectacled Tully and the waif-like Helen, prefigured Woody Allen with Mia Farrow (though they were generally funnier).

The cinematography is cheesy, the pacing poor. The success of the movie has to have been due to being charmed by the idea of a small band of men (see Henry V) winning (however inadvertently) a war with a super-power and making the world a better place (without casualties). The American audience seemed to identify with the anti-militarist feudal duchy rather than with the absurd breast-thumping CIA and Army Americans and could be flattered by unchallenged claims that the US always treated small countries well. The doomsday bomb is not taken seriously by the movie (though taken seriously by the rest of the world in the movie) and the speech Tully makes for nuclear disarmament was not taken to heart for sure.

"The Mouse That Roared" is very mildly amusing, barely able to sustain an 83-minute running time, though better than the somewhat similar ludicrous plot of "The Pink Panther Strikes Again." and mercifully shorter than the older clueless Sellers character falling up in (what I think is the very overrated) Being There.

I guess I prefer Sellers in smaller doses--the original "The Ladykillers," the out-of-it physician in The Wrong Box, Quilty in the first film "Lolita" and in the supporting (if title) role as Dr. Strangelove.



© 2007, Stephen O. Murray

Being about the triumph of the littlest country, this seems to fit with Dianapinions's little writeoff.



Recommended: Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children up to Age 4