The Tin Drum [VHS] [1995]

 

 

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Oskar Matzerath,the precocious protagonist who refuses to grow up,in Volker Schlondorff's 1979 film,Tin Drum,is an unreliable narrator.This is Gunther Grass's own childhood,but he grew:that's how he ended up wanting to partake in the war.The film captures much of the novel's picaresque energy and surrealism.It opens with Oskar's grandmother sitting in a muddy field heating potatoes.She is impregnated with Oskar's mother by Joseph,the man on the run from the police,hiding under her skirt.Oskar always speaks off screen,often in the 3rd person, sometimes in the 1st,you don't really know where this voice is coming from.The reason-he is pretending to be a 3 year old.You see a child, but with the brain of a grown-up.His shrieking angry little voice is the opposite of what you expect.

David Bennent gives an eerie performance.Like a doe-eyed child,but with a maturity and aloof quality.When he's not shattering glass,his behaviour is more restrained than that of the adults around him,including his 2 fatherfigures: his mother's grocer husband Alfred,who becomes an enthusiastic Nazi,and Oskar's heroic uncle,Jan, who takes part in the defence of the Polish post office in Danzig in 1939-one of the 1st battles of WWII.Oskar's 2 father figures show different aspects of Grass's own character.The ambivalence to the Nazis are like the passages in Grass's memoir,Peeling the Onion(2006),in which he seeks belatedly to justify his wartime behaviour.In The Tin Drum,Grass was lambasted for writing in too brazen and open a way about the Nazi era.We now know Grass's admission he had been a member as a teenager of the Waffen SS.Was he the nation's bad conscience or was he expiating his own pettiness?Driven by guilt to write The Tin Drum to exorcise the demons?

Schlondorff said Nazism was a consequence of the failure of the Weimar Republic.The large middle class were excluded from any participation in its affairs.Oskar is a representative.He has this incredible urge for power.He feels enormous,but he's a dwarf.So he's the symbol of his class but he would like to be the one in command,but there's the Fuhrer.His scream is because he'd like to be no.1.This child-like behaviour is acceptable from a child, but not from grown-ups:then it becomes infantile,diminishing.Oskar resents the display.He thinks he's in the true world.In the bandstand scene he's not resisting the Nazis but power of any kind.Objects take on a big significance. The universe of Oskar is a universe of toys.The whole universe should look like a toy;his drum the no.1 toy.

Food is important.It comes to an extreme when his mum kills herself.Eels coming from the horse's head like after-birth. She eats fish,gets sick,eats more fish because of her guilt.Fish is the symbol of her Christianity.The sexual scenes are central to the kind of world Oskar is born into.How his mother was born.We see Oskar in the womb, planning his entry into the fallen world.His mother's adultery is something he's aware of when she leaves him in the toyshop.He climbs to the roof and screams shattering all the windows of the building opposite.Frustration makes Oskar beat his drum or scream.The new director's cut has over 20 minutes of scenes the director was obliged to cut in 1979.The running time is at 163 minutes in the new cut,Schlondorff is clarifying the '79 cut,adding new layers.

Casting a twelve-year-old boy (David Bennent) as Oskar,the director fashioned "world history experienced from below," from the perspective of a small rebel armed with a drum and graced with a voice that breaks glass. A twisted variation on the German Bildungsroman, Oskar's education between the fronts of German and Polish history becomes an exercise in alienation and deformation. The youth refuses to accommodate himself to the status quo and compels himself to stop growing at the age of three. His fulsome drumming beats against the tenor of the times and his shrill scream poses a public menace. The film imbues the boy's negativity with a subversive power; his acts of refusal both issue from and militate against the experience of history.Worth seeing for the extra scenes which add
new light to this old material and new archive material.

I have actually broken my first copy and was eager to secure a replacement.

Having read the book by Grass, I was concerned how it might translate to the screen. It actually works extremely well, capturing much of the claustrophobic/paranoid atmosphere of the book.

Obviously, things have had to go. Some of the ..ahem... sticky and descriptive bits have been left out - in the wrong hands it could have been verging on pornographic, which certainly isn't the tone of the book.

Also, much of Oskar's musing's have been curtailed - the film ends at a point where the book has still some time to cover. This could cause some confusion for anyone who has not read it as they would have no idea that Oskar is actually telling his story from a lunatic asylum.

Despite these shortcomings, though, one experiences a wealth of emotions during the showing. There is sorrow, laughter, (look out for the waltzing Hitler Youth) anguish (Charles Aznovour as the toyshop owner) and bewilderment to name a few.

The music at the beginning is heavy and plodding - one can imagine a heavy horse pulling a cart through muddy potato fields. The wailing of the Jew's Harp further intensifies the experience.

Oskar is faithfully represented by David Bennett -the boy who decides not to grow. The other members of the cast, though maybe not household names provide a rich mixture of characters who show a no-holds-barred-reality. Just look at the haircut of the Youth Leader! There is no prettyfication here.

It stands up as a film in its own right. It does have blemishes, but I don't feel that they detract from the the experience and certainly can assist the understanding of an often enigmatic book.

Although it's over 20 years since i saw this film at the cinema. This film still has the power to shock and disturb. It could be viewed as a black comedy or as a realistic fantasy. The story though, is fairly simple Oscar matzereth(David Bennent), a child of only 3. Decides he doesn't want to grow up, So he throws himself down the celler steps,an act that causes him to stop growing. As the nazis take power in germany Oscar beats out his anger on his toy drum.
The film seems to be about 2 minutes shorter then the version i saw in 1980.Most of the cuts are from sex scenes between oscars uncle and his mother and a controversial sequence in which Oscar has oral sex with his nanny. That said, if you've never seen the film you probably wouldn't notice. You certainly won't have seen anything like it befor. The film won the best foreign language oscar in 1979. An award it richly deserved.

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4.0 out of 5 stars The Tin Drum - film
I recall seeing this film soon after its release in 1979 - it won many awards. Rather quirky but with a strong message it remained faithful to Gunter Grass' original novel. Read more

Published 6 months ago by persian fire

4.0 out of 5 stars Awash with humanity
Without duplicating the accurate comments in other reviews, I agree entirely with their sentiments. The Tin Drum is a film veering between, on the on hand disturbing,... Read more

Published 10 months ago by Andy Millward

5.0 out of 5 stars Scream and Shout

A boy who refuses to grow up during the time of National Socialism. A good strategy in some respects as it gets you out of the army. Read more

Published 24 months ago by Dr. Delvis Memphistopheles

5.0 out of 5 stars The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel)
Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of Gunter Grass' seminal 1960 opus about a child growing up during the rise of the Third Reich and a sympathetic interpretation of how ordinary... Read more

Published on 12 Jan 2010 by Nicolas Vagg

4.0 out of 5 stars Fairly faithful representation of the book
I thought this film gave a good representation of the book - particularly the child playing Oskar. I think some other reviews have exagerrated the shock/disgust factor although... Read more

Published on 28 Sep 2009 by BrianK

4.0 out of 5 stars More to it than meets the eye
Allegorical story or absurdist fantasy? Whichever this is, its a high class piece of filmmaking from director Volker Schlondorff. Read more

Published on 31 Aug 2008 by S J Buck

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrifying, Disturbing, Frightening. This film is brilliant
THE TIN DRUM (or DIE BLECHTROMMEL, by it's german title) is a film that not everyone has heard of, and if they have, not likely to have seen it. Read more

Published on 11 Jan 2005 by aurtherwood

5.0 out of 5 stars German History/Satire in a nutshell
This review pertains to the US Code 1 Criterion Collection edition of the film.
The Tin Drum is based on Gunther Grass's Nobel winning novel. Read more

Published on 3 Jun 2004 by cybergel78

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