The Mouse That Roared - 1959 - 4 Stars

Director: Jack Arnold
Cast: Peter Sellers, Jean Seberg, William Hartnell, David Kosoff

The Mouse That Roared opens with a meta-joke that feels lifted from a Zucker, Abrams, Zucker film, however it predates the ZAZ films by three decades. Therein lies the fundamental problem with The Mouse That Roared, a comparatively forgotten movie that is between Duck Soup and Dr. Strangelove on the evolutionary scale of film comedy. It is funny, but its jokes rarely produce raucous laughter because their brilliance has been dimmed from frequent use in modern comedy. Like Duck Soup it follows the travails of a fictional country and like Strangelove it features three outstanding performances by the chameleonic Peter Seller, however the similarities run deeper than those superficialities. What these movies share is an ability to deliver scathing political satire and broad vaudevillian comedy in the same film without creating a tonal imbalance.

The Mouse That Roared follows the travails of a bankrupt fictional country Fenwick, who decide the best way to get out of debt is to declare war against the US, immediately surrender and wait for the US to give money to Fenwick's post-war rebuilding effort. It's a sharp premise and one that leads to some excellent jokes about US Foreign Policy and some prescient insights about Cold War Paranoia years before The Cold War began. There is a tacked on a romantic subplot and a lame twist at the end. If this movie were released today I doubt I would be as charitable with my grade, but this was clearly a groundbreaking film when it was made and it deserves to be rewarded for that.