Word: fenwick
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...Mouse on the Moon is a very comforting movie, especially if you are worried about the World Situation. There they are: clean-shaven Americans, rumpled Russians and quaintly inefficient Englishmen, and the preposterous Duchy of Grand Fenwick which foils them all and finally saves the world...
...Grand Fenwick is the same country that won World War III in The Mouse that Roared and more or less the same principality which Peter Ustinov presided over in Romanoff and Juliet. This time the Fenwickians win the space race in a rocket supplied by the Soviet Union, financed by the United States, and fueled with the wine of Grand Fenwick. But the story isn't crucial; it's simply an excuse for a machine-gun-fast series of gags satirizing such juicy targets as international diplomacy, German scientists, student peace marchers, and American grammar...
Since Mouse was produced by Englishmen, it's not surprising that Grand Fenwick is slightly British. Its tiny parliament is divided into exaggerated Tories in morning clothes and cravats and stereotyped socialists in identical, ill-fitting brown suits. Its Duchess, charmingly played by Margaret Rutherford, calls herself "we" and suggests that the matter of indoor plumbing be referred to the Privy Council...
...Mouse on the Moon. Like so many Son of and So-and-So Meets sequels, this offspring of 1959's The Mouse That Roared just barely squeaks by. Sorely missed is Peter Sellers, who in the triple role of Grand Duchess Gloriana of Grand Fenwick, Prime Minister Mountjoy and Field Marshal Bascombe managed to make Roared an off-beat tour de force. Neither waggish, wrattled Margaret Rutherford as the 1963 model Gloriana nor fatuous, foppish Ron Moody as the new Mountjoy manages to do more than add tricks to what is already too tricky...
...that the duchy launches in full ivew of an invited delegation of U.S., British and Russian diplomats has a fringed curtain at a stained-glass window, and carries a hot water bottle, a teapot, a cage of live chickens, a ukulele and a selection of good wines. When Grand Fenwick's spacemen get to the moon just ahead of the Americans and Russians, they plant their flag, turn to the arrivals, and say: "Oh, good evening there. Grand Fenwick welcomes you to its moon," and invite them all to a chicken dinner. But long before this, the lampoon loses...