The Tin Drum

Star Review

The Tin Drum by Volker Schlondorff is the story of Oskar Matzerath, a boy who grows up in Eastern Germany prior to and during World War II. Oskar decides the only way to protest being part of the adult world is by banging on his drum and remaining a child forever. The drum is his rebuttal of society and his protest against the mentality of his family and neighborhood (or perhaps against all passive people in Nazi Germany at that time). Based on Gunter Grass's highly acclaimed novel that captured the madness of war, the film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign film in 1980, and the Palm d’Or at Cannes.


Oskar can scream with such a high pitch that he can shatter any piece of glass. He even controls his scream to the point where he can break windows on the other side of the city, or etch writing into glass. Oskar uses his ability to manipulate and control the adult world, often using vicious and cynical snide comments about the insanity around him. At one point, he disrupts a Nazi rally by changing the beat of his tin drum to the Blue Danube which the band then follows. The ensuing scene where the crowd breaks into a dance and the rain comes down leaving the Nazi soldiers bewildered is one of the best in the film. Oskar tries to shock the world out of its inhumanity. His life reflects Germany's struggle to free itself from its own dream of Teutonic superiority and find peace in the national soul. It is an absorbing and thought provoking film.

Howard Schumann on 10th October 2003

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Film Description

A powerful adaptation of Gunter Grass's epic novel. The narrator of the film is little Oscar, a precocious child of a permissive petit-bourgeois couple. He decides to stop growing on his third birthday, the same year that Hitler came to power, as a protest against the sordid sexuality of his surroundings and the unstoppable growth of Nazism. With his noisy tin drum always at his side and a piercing scream that can shatter glass, Oscar makes his disturbing and darkly comic way through Hitler's Germany.

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Set against the backdrop of the Nazi rise to power and recounting the story of young Oskar Matzerath - the little boy with the ear-piercing scream and the penchant for... more >

Set against the backdrop of the Nazi rise to power and recounting the story of young Oskar Matzerath - the little boy with the ear-piercing scream and the penchant for rat-a-tat-tapping red and white tin drums, the little boy who decided to stop growing at the age of three - Volker Schlondorff's admittedly uneven adaptation of Nobel Prize winning novelist Gunter Grass' most famous work The Tin Drum is as eerily unsettling as Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend and as grotesquely comic as Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen.

The movie reverberates with images both mildly odd and downright strange - the close-up of young Oskar's screaming face as he shatters a teacher's spectacles, a doctor's embryo jar and all of the windows in the house in which his mother commits adultery; the drumming which turns a fierce Nazi demonstration into Last Night at the Proms; the eels squirming about within a dead donkey's head yanked from the ocean (and the ensuing domestic in which Oskar's mother plonks violently upon the family piano and hoarsely shrieks German folk music drowning out Oskar's father's attempts to get her to eat).

But that is not to say Schlondorff gets everything right: the movie is both too literal and too oblique. Portions of the novel are served up virtually verbatim whilst other sections (the last third of the book) are overlooked in favour of that which is grotesque, that which is outlandish and that which is strange. Minor niggles aside, however, the movie is a genuine oddity (an oddity made odder still given the plaudits it received - Best Foreign Film Oscar 1979, Best Film at Cannes) worth watching for its central performance alone - the wide eyed, hollow cheeked magnificence that is David Bennent.
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Film Details

Cast

Mario Adorf, David Bennent, Angela Winkler

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