Cinema: Lunar Buffoonery

The 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.

Some of the comic baggage is incomprehensibly tasteless. British bathroom humor, some of it—abetted by dentiperforate Terry-Thomas, who skulks about as a spy—is overdone drollery. The rocket 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 its point, and instead of being a pungent satire on the futility of the space race, Mouse on the Moon is just a sparse farce.