THE TIN DRUM Movie Review
Die Blechtrommel
Oskar (David Bennent), a horrified German child of the 1920s, wills himself to stop growing in response to the ballooning Nazi presence in his country. As his chosen means of expression, the boy communicates his anger, fear, and outrage by pounding on a tin drum. Loudly. Director Volker Schlöndorff's widely praised adaptation of Günter Grass's novel goes for strong, often grotesque, nearly expressionistic imagery in its portrait of a shocked innocent who would rather distort himself than blend unobtrusively into a distorted world. The problem for me was that all that distorting—which the director and his cinematographer participate in as well—ends up being far too showy for the film's own good. The filmmaking style is Schlöndorff's cinematic equivalent of pounding on that drum, and as a result you may end up emerging from The Tin Drum feeling more pummeled than enlightened. The film is constructed out of schematic, hard-hitting symbolism, and what power it achieves comes from striking, individual images and set pieces, such as Oskar's ability to shatter windows with his scream (it was a big year for explosive bellowing at the movies—Jerzy Skolimowski's The Shout had been released just months earlier).Videocassettes of The Tin Drum have idiotically been banned from some American communities because of explicit content. That, of course, is an outrage that should not be tolerated, but being banned doesn't make the film a classic. Have students read the book instead (if they haven't banned that yet). With Angela Winkler, Daniel Olbrychski, Mario Adorf, Charles Aznavour, and Heinz Bennent. Co-winner of the Grand Prize (with Apocalypse Now) at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival; Academy Award, Best Foreign Language Film.
NEXT STOP … Forbidden Games, Au Revoir les Enfants, The Quiet Room
1979 (R) 141m/C GE David Bennent, Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, Daniel Olbrychski, Katharina Thalbach, Heinz Bennent, Andrea Ferreol, Charles Aznavour; D: Volker Schlondorff; W: Jean-Claude Carriere, Volker Schlondorff; C: Igor Luther, M: Maurice Jarre. Academy Awards ‘79: Best Foreign Film; Cannes Film Festival ‘79: Best Film; Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards ‘80: Best Foreign Film. VHS KIV, GLV, AUD