The Mouse on the Moon

I've been going through a lot of the shorter movies on my DVR, and shorter movies generally means older movies. So even though TCM ran it just a few weeks back, I decided to watch The Mouse on the Moon rather than some of the stuff that's been on my DVR for a long time because it dates from the early 1960s.

The Mouse on the Moon is a sequel to The Mouse that Roared, a movie I thought I had blogged about but apparently not. The plot of the original movie involved the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, one of those small political entities that dotted Central Europe in movies from before World War II when the writers needed a prince from a fictional place -- think the prince who resolves the plot problems in First Lady if you watched that. Anyhow, the country more or less went bankrupt and came up with a ruse to get financial aid from the West.

A few years later, the country is still as backward as ever, and still as much in need of financial aid as ever to try to modernize the country. Worse, the country's main export, its wine, is being barred from export because the stuff has a nasty habit of exploding. Well, now that it's the early 1960s instead of the late 1950s, there's a space race going on. Prime Minister Mountjoy (Ron Moody) comes up with the brilliant idea to say that it wants to enter the space race, and get financial assistance to help in this regard. He knows the Americans will give on the reasoning that it's a diplomatic coup and the country will never be successful; Grand Fenwick can then use the money to do things like install running water.

Things get more interesting when the Soviets respond by sending an actual rocket. Meanwhile, the country's top scientist, Dr. Kokintz (David Kossoff), has figured out that whlie the wine may be explosive, it also has anti-gravity properties that make it a perfect propellant for a rocket ship, as using it won't require the rocket to achieve escape velocity. So perhaps they'll be able to figure out a way to get to the moon, which would suit Kokintz just fine. It would also make Mountjoy's son Vincent (Bernard Cribbins) happy. In theory, he's supposed to be next in line for the hereditary prime ministership, but he really wants to be an astronaut.

Meanwhile, the Americans, Soviets, and British all get alarmed at the prospect that somebody else might get to the moon first, so they start trying to figure out what Grand Fenwick is really up to. Kokintz is able to get the rocket launched, but because they don't need escape velocity, it's going to take longer to get to the moon than it would take the Apollo program (well, technically Apollo hadn't been started yet) to, at least from liftoff from Earth to landing on the moon. So the US and Soviets both rush rockets into preparation to try to beat both Grand Fenwick and each other.

The problem with The Mouse on the Moon is that it feels like the writers ran out of ideas for Grand Fenwick after The Mouse That Roared. This, even though the movie is based on a book. The producers apparently had a financial hit with The Mouse That Roared, and wanting to continue that, came up with this, but like Grand Fenwick itself, not really keeping up with the times. So what we get is a lot of stuff that feels like it's past its sell-by date, and not quite as funny as it otherwise might have been.

I'll probably have to track down a copy of The Mouse that Roared and watch it, as it's been years since the last time I saw it.