The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum (1979) is adapted from Günter Grass's novel and its premise is this: at three years old, Oskar looks at the adult world and decides not to grow. He is born in Danzig, throws himself down the cellar stairs on his third birthday, and from then on his body stops. He carries a tin drum, and when something happens that he does not want, he screams. The scream shatters glass. Not growing is not a metaphor here, it is the rule of the film. Oskar watches the rise of the Nazis, the war and the ruin from a child's height, and nobody feels any need to explain anything to him. The best scene is a Nazi rally. Oskar gets underneath the stand and starts drumming, the band loses the beat, and the rally turns into a waltz. Grass's entire argument is in those three minutes. David Bennent, who plays Oskar, was twelve during filming and had a growth condition. Some scenes were argued about for years. In 1997 a court in Oklahoma declared the film obscene and police collected the tapes from video rental shops. The ruling was later overturned. It shared the Palme d'Or with Apocalypse Now in 1979 and won the Foreign Language Film Oscar. It runs 162 minutes. Good for: German cinema, literary adaptation, and allegory. Less good for: there is sexual content, violence toward animals, and material that is hard to sit through. It is not an easy film.