The Mouse That Roared

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The Mouse That Roared
The DVD cover
Directed by	Jack Arnold
Produced by	Walter Shenson Jon Penington
Written by	Roger MacDougall Stanley Mann
Starring	Peter Sellers Jean Seberg William Hartnell David Kossoff Leo McKern MacDonald Parke Austin Willis
Music by	Edwin Astley
Cinematography	John Wilcox
Editing by	Raymond Poulton
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date(s)	1959
Running time	83 min.
Country	U.K.
Language	English
Followed by	The Mouse on the Moon
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

The Mouse that Roared is a 1955 novel by Irish writer Leonard Wibberley that launched a series of satirical books about a fictional European nation called the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

Tiny (3 miles by 5 miles) Grand Fenwick borders Switzerland and France in the Alps, and proudly retains a pre-industrial economy, dependent almost entirely on making Pinot Grand Fenwick wine. Wibberley places Grand Fenwick in a series of absurd situations, where it goes up against superpowers and wins. In The Mouse that Roared it declares war on the United States after US-produced "Grand Enwick" wine threatens to undermine their economy. Expecting to be dealt a crushing defeat (and then rebuild itself through the largess that the United States bestows on its vanquished enemies such as in the Marshall Plan) the tiny Duchy instead defeats the United States, purely by accident, by capturing the Q-bomb, a prototype doomsday device that could destroy the world if triggered.

Wibberley goes beyond the merely comic, using the situation to make commentary about modern politics and world situations. This novel was followed by four sequels - Beware of the Mouse (1958), The Mouse on the Moon (1962), The Mouse on Wall Street (1969), and The Mouse that Saved the West (1981) - none of which were nearly as successful.

[edit] Other media

The Mouse That Roared was made into a 1959 film starring Peter Sellers in three different roles (the Duchess, the Prime Minister, and Tully Bascombe, the military leader), Jean Seberg as his love interest, and co-starring William Hartnell as Will Buckley.
A sequel was made in 1963, based on The Mouse on the Moon ((Richard Lester), with Margaret Rutherford, Ron Moody, Bernard Cribbins, and Terry-Thomas instead of Sellers.
The Mouse That Roared has also been adapted as a stage play, which was and is immensely popular in amateur and school theaters.

[edit] Trivia

Professor Kenneth Ganezer of CSU Dominguez Hills compared himself to The Mouse That Roared after being named one of the “hottest” researchers by the publication Science Watch. [1]
The Marseilles and New York harbor sequences were filmed in Southampton, UK. The presence of the RMS Queen Elizabeth ocean liner there was a lucky coincidence.