Tin Drum. (15.)
Directed by Volker Schlondorff. 1979.
Starring David Bennent, Mario Adorf, Maria Winkler, Daniel Olbrychski, Berta Drews, Andrea Ferriol and Charles Aznavour. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion Collection. 163 mins.
The Tin Drum is a story about an evil little child that was born in Danzig in the first half of the 20th century, but doesn't become a Nazi. Adapted from Gunter Grass's novel, its central character, Oskar (Bennent) is a kind of sociopathic Peter Pan who at the age of three stops growing and bangs away on his beloved toy drum as the years pass him through the Neverneverland of Nazi Germany. He's still an obnoxious little tosspot, but he isn't an obnoxious little Nazi tosspot.
The Tin Drum's place in movie history is as the film that shared the Barn Door top prize at Cannes with Apocalypse Now in 1979. After Cannes, Coppola's Vietnam epic received an uneven critical reception initially – it was beaten to the Oscar by Kramer vs Kramer - and it took a few years to be properly established as a real landmark movie. Tin Drum was a big noise at the time – it won its foreign-language Oscar – but has since receded from view.
As a screen adaptation of a highly respected novel, it goes wrong in most of the usual ways. Grass's book is a picaresque piece of magic realism with an unreliable narrator: a set of elements that are almost impossible to get on to the screen. It's the kind of story where a child is born with an adult intelligence and decides to stop growing at the age of three. The moment he is born his mother (Winkler) announces that when he is three years old he shall have a tin drum that will be his favourite toy. And he does and it is.
Oskar has a superpower which is that he can break glass with his high pitched scream. At the start, he relates the tale of how his grandmother met his grandfather, an escaped arsonist who impregnates her while hiding under ample skirt to evade the soldiers chasing him. On the page the distancing of the narrative voice makes such exaggerated events – tall tales told by a little man – acceptable to a reader, but on the screen, it's just one over-the-top event after another.
Which would be fine if there was some point to it but Schlondorff's film is a big, broad, bawdy, colourful romp that, because it's about the Nazis, isn't any fun. And having gone to all the effort of knocking up all that Swastika covered regalia and putting all those extras in uniform, it doesn't offer any insight into the collective craziness that swept over the Germans or address the question of how Europe's most level headed nation came to fall for such fancy dress nonsense. They didn't even have social media as an excuse back then.
The Tin Drum's Canz triumph was, in retrospect, the culmination of the New German Cinema of Wenders, Herzog, Fassbinder, etc that had made West Germany such a potent film centre in the 70s. While most of the German films of that era had prefered to deal tangentially with their historical shame, this did it head-on and inadvertently called time on the whole movement.
On the evidence of this Schlondorff was one of the movements move pedestrian participants. Tin Drum is a big budget, lavish production but there isn't any particular cinematic invention or flair in it. Though the material is outlandish, it is shot and edited like a conventional historical epic. It does though contain a memorable performance by the then 11-year-old Bennent as Oskar. Granted, it's all in one note but that's all the script gives him to do and he does it to the max. His demonic intensity provides the film with what little spark it has. He's like a John Birt ventriloquist doll come to life.
Supplements.
New interview with Schlöndorff about the making of the film and the creation of the complete version
Directed by Volker Schlondorff. 1979.
Starring David Bennent, Mario Adorf, Maria Winkler, Daniel Olbrychski, Berta Drews, Andrea Ferriol and Charles Aznavour. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion Collection. 163 mins.
The Tin Drum is a story about an evil little child that was born in Danzig in the first half of the 20th century, but doesn't become a Nazi. Adapted from Gunter Grass's novel, its central character, Oskar (Bennent) is a kind of sociopathic Peter Pan who at the age of three stops growing and bangs away on his beloved toy drum as the years pass him through the Neverneverland of Nazi Germany. He's still an obnoxious little tosspot, but he isn't an obnoxious little Nazi tosspot.
The Tin Drum's place in movie history is as the film that shared the Barn Door top prize at Cannes with Apocalypse Now in 1979. After Cannes, Coppola's Vietnam epic received an uneven critical reception initially – it was beaten to the Oscar by Kramer vs Kramer - and it took a few years to be properly established as a real landmark movie. Tin Drum was a big noise at the time – it won its foreign-language Oscar – but has since receded from view.
As a screen adaptation of a highly respected novel, it goes wrong in most of the usual ways. Grass's book is a picaresque piece of magic realism with an unreliable narrator: a set of elements that are almost impossible to get on to the screen. It's the kind of story where a child is born with an adult intelligence and decides to stop growing at the age of three. The moment he is born his mother (Winkler) announces that when he is three years old he shall have a tin drum that will be his favourite toy. And he does and it is.
Oskar has a superpower which is that he can break glass with his high pitched scream. At the start, he relates the tale of how his grandmother met his grandfather, an escaped arsonist who impregnates her while hiding under ample skirt to evade the soldiers chasing him. On the page the distancing of the narrative voice makes such exaggerated events – tall tales told by a little man – acceptable to a reader, but on the screen, it's just one over-the-top event after another.
Which would be fine if there was some point to it but Schlondorff's film is a big, broad, bawdy, colourful romp that, because it's about the Nazis, isn't any fun. And having gone to all the effort of knocking up all that Swastika covered regalia and putting all those extras in uniform, it doesn't offer any insight into the collective craziness that swept over the Germans or address the question of how Europe's most level headed nation came to fall for such fancy dress nonsense. They didn't even have social media as an excuse back then.
The Tin Drum's Canz triumph was, in retrospect, the culmination of the New German Cinema of Wenders, Herzog, Fassbinder, etc that had made West Germany such a potent film centre in the 70s. While most of the German films of that era had prefered to deal tangentially with their historical shame, this did it head-on and inadvertently called time on the whole movement.
On the evidence of this Schlondorff was one of the movements move pedestrian participants. Tin Drum is a big budget, lavish production but there isn't any particular cinematic invention or flair in it. Though the material is outlandish, it is shot and edited like a conventional historical epic. It does though contain a memorable performance by the then 11-year-old Bennent as Oskar. Granted, it's all in one note but that's all the script gives him to do and he does it to the max. His demonic intensity provides the film with what little spark it has. He's like a John Birt ventriloquist doll come to life.
Supplements.
New interview with Schlöndorff about the making of the film and the creation of the complete version
- New interview with film scholar Timothy Corrigan
- German audio recording of Günter Grass reading an excerpt from his novel The Tin Drum, illustrated with the corresponding scene from the film
- Television interview excerpts featuring Schlöndorff, Grass, actors David Bennent and Mario Adorf, and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Geoffrey Macnab and 1978 statements by Grass about the adaptation of his novel.
