How others will see it. This good-natured satire of world politics is mildly amusing now and then. Peter Sellers, for example, gets seasick just stepping onto an anchored boat. Sellers, dressed up as the Grand Fenwick queen, has one undeniably good line:
Blustering General Snippet: I warn you madam, I know the Geneva
Convention by heart.
Good queen Sellers: Oh, how nice. You must recite it to me some
evening [while] I play the harpsichord.
And Jean Seberg is pretty. But beyond the occasional gag that works, we have an agreeable but rather tame British comedy about pre-Nixon Cold War politics. Don't compare The Mouse That Roared to Dr. Strangelove, even though the latter also featues Sellers in multiple roles. It's not that funny, or revealing.
How I felt about it. The fearful bomb looks like a football, and ticks like a desktop windup alarm clock. It's designed by a doctor whose only assistant is his prim, protective daughter, who not only knows nothing about the bomb, but is single and unattached. The doctor, with a fragile bomb capable of destroying the world, works in an unguarded laboratory. And I suppose he buys the uranium at Sears. I don't buy it.
Even during an air raid drill, the coast harbors would be guarded. Men dressed up as crusaders would not be mistaken for Martians. The general and his policemen guard would be armed, and would not allow themselves to be taken prisoner without a fight. The Prime Minister and the loyal opposition seem curiously eager to spirit the bomb out of Grand Fenwick. Why?
I suppose that The Mouse That Roared is trying to make a statement about the arms race and especially the dangers of nuclear weapons. But these same nuclear arms have at least prevented World War III, although small-scale slaughter regularly occurs today, usually within the borders of a lawless or ethnically divided small countries.
The problem with all nations turning in their nuclear weapons is that if a nation cheats, and doesn't turn theirs in, they control our fates. Thus, the peace treaty that ends the film is unworkable, like the product of a well intended but naive social studies school project.