Our silly time continues with the Film of the Week, one of those that used to show up on prime time television when I was a kid — along with The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Wizard of Oz, Ben-Hur, and many others, so that if you meet an American my age, odds are very strong that he’ll have the same memories. Now, if you asked me which was the silliest of all those movies that one of the networks would run more or less every year, it would be It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, though what’s satirical about that film is that otherwise ordinary people go mad through greed and end up doing things they’d never do, such as take apart a new auto shop, blow up a hardware store, crash-land an airplane, impersonate a government agent, and — as a Chief of Police — to try to run off to Mexico with stolen money. To this day, my brother and I can fire off lines from that film, such as that of the whiney Chief’s wife on the telephone, talking about their daughter Bobby Sue, “You don’t seem to know that a girl who’s six-foot-three is going to have special PRAH-blems!” There’s a streak of malice in that film, but none in our silly film for today: The Mouse that Roared.

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Actually, now that I think of it, this week’s film is a little like last week’s, A Bell for Adano, in that we’ve got a country in Europe, a war, and the idea that Americans are actually pretty cheerful sorts who will give quite a lot to defeated enemies, considering that most of the people aren’t enemies at all, but overburdened victims of bad leaders and their bad philosophies. But In The Mouse that Roared, it’s a made-up country, and very tiny: the Grand Duchy of Fenwick. There’s only one export, which the duchy depends on for all its income, a pinot noir “de Fenwick,” made from grapes that a couple of the Fenwick peasants — who are all well-fed and happy and peaceful — crush with their bare feet in a big vat. Unfortunately, some cheap outfit in California has made a mock wine, “de Enwick,” pushing the Fenwick wine out of the market. So the Prime Minister, Count Rupert Mountjoy (Peter Sellers, with a goatee) has an idea. Since the Americans haven’t paid any attention to their protests, the Grand Duchy of Fenwick decides to declare war on the United States, knowing that they will lose — Fenwick’s army consists of a couple of dozen guys who get themselves up in medieval chain mail, and shoot arrows from the longbow. They’re led by the pleasant bumbling Field Marshal Tully Bascomb (also Peter Sellers, without a goatee). So the Prime Minister makes the proposal to the good and gracious dowager Duchess Gloriana XII (ALSO played by Peter Sellers, with a lot of lace and pleasant smiles), and she goes along, advising the departing troops to keep safe, and to be friendly to the Americans, and not to hurt anybody.
But when the Fenwick army arrives by ship in New York, everybody’s underground for a big air raid drill, except for a nuclear physicist and his daughter. He’s fashioned, all by himself, the “Q Bomb,” powerful enough to wipe out all of North America, “and some of the South, too,” he says. It’s about the size and shape of an American football, with dials and buttons, and it makes a sharp electrical hissing noise if you try to touch it. But it’s very delicate. “Do you have a hairpin?” he asks his daughter, as he puts the last touches on it. And it’s his office where the Fenwick Army ends up — and Tully thinks, hmm, maybe we’ve got a change in plans here after all! Maybe — Fenwick will win the war! “That blithering idiot!” the Prime Minister splutters when the “army” comes back, with the professor, his daughter, and five or six American officers, as “prisoners of war,” while all the people are waving American flags and the band is playing “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” and “From the Halls of Montezuma,” — the Marines’ hymn, and they suddenly notice that all the boyish American lads they were expecting aren’t there.

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So now it’s the little “mouse that roared,” the Grand Duchy of Fenwick, that has a bomb (or everybody thinks so, which will do just as well) that could destroy Europe. What now? And of course, Tully is in love with the professor’s feisty daughter (Jean Seberg). And other nations of the world get into the act, trying to outdo one another in largesse to Fenwick. But maybe the small nations of the world ought to have their day in the sun, eh? This one’s for the whole family.

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