Independent Films, Film Profiles

The Mouse That Roared

The Mouse that Roared is a 1955 novel by Irish writer Leonard Wibberley that launched a series of satirical books about an imaginary country in Europe called the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. Wibberley goes beyond the merely comic, using the situation to make commentary about modern politics and world situations.Released in February 1955 by Little, Brown, the novel first appeared under the title The Day New York Was Invaded as a Saturday Evening Post serial in six consecutive weeks, from Christmas Day, 1954 through 29 January 1955. The English edition (London: Robert Hale, 1955) bore the author's original title idea, "The Wrath of Grapes", a pun on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.Wibberley published 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).The phrase "mouse that roared" proved a durable meme over half a century, and is still current. Wibberley places Fenwick in a series of absurd situations, where it goes up against superpowers and wins.The tiny (3 miles by 5 miles) European Duchy of Grand Fenwick, nestled in the Alps between Switzerland and France, proudly retains a pre-industrial economy, dependent almost entirely on making Pinot Grand Fenwick wine.When an American winery makes a knockoff version, "Pinot Grand Enwick," it quickly puts the tiny country on the verge of bankruptcy. The Prime Minister decides that their only course of action is to declare war on the United States. Expecting a quick and total defeat (since their standing army is tiny and equipped with bows and arrows), the country confidently expects to rebuild itself through the generous largesse that the United States bestows on all its vanquished enemies (as it did for Nazi Germany through the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II.)Instead, the Duchy defeats the mighty superpower, purely by accident: landing in New York City, almost completely deserted aboveground because of a city-wide disaster drill, the Duchy's invading "army" wanders to a top secret government lab and unintentionally captures the Q-bomb, a prototype doomsday device that could destroy the world if triggered.