The war in Ukraine was partly foretold in this genius film by Peter sellers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5upSKtduGU
Peter sellers plays the role of President Zelensky!
A piddly country (called Grand Fenwick )takes on a superpower (the US) with the intention to stage an honourable defeat since the spoils of defeat are so much greater than the spoils of victory for an insignificant nation as they might be for Ukraine, where quick defeat might gain immediate admittance to the EU and NATO, while victory merely postpones the quarrel.
The war goes badly for Grand Fenwick and they inadvertently win, and hence cannot claim the spoils of defeat. The entire world joins up and provides weapons and troops to protect the piddle country from the wrath of the superpower. The parallels and absurdities are amazing!
A massive nuclear bomb serves as a comic subplot. Like Gran Fenwick, Ukraine is having great difficulty obtaining any benefits at all from its ill advised alliance with NATO and its squabblings with Russia, and may very well end up cut in two or more parts as well as being wrecked and occupied, if it does not cause world war III.
By a strange coincidence, Sellers, like Zelensky was a Jew although he never knew it until he was an adult, he even resembles Zelensky in some shots. Watch it and find out. The film offers two endings, one where the huge bomb detonates.In the alternative ending Sellers obtains favourable trade terms from the superpower, as well as punitive damages and a guarantee of nuclear disarmament policed by a group of small nations.
It's a very sfilm in the Shepperton tradition that exposes the great absurdities of grand international allegiances, and mismatches of power in the nuclear age. Well worth watching as a museum piece and as a reminder that nothing under the sun is totally new!
