popcorninhell Is it possible to find a movie repulsive yet still feel it's worth a watch? The Tin Drum asked that of me last night, and I have the overwhelming feeling that I am not alone. The film won multiple awards during its heyday. It tied with Apocalypse Now (1979) for the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and, if that weren't enough, it took home an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Yet being aware of the film's remarkable accolades does not make watching it any easier.Based on Gunter Grass's controversial novel, the film is a surreal first-person saga about a boy from Danzig named Oskar who is brought into this world with a full consciousness. On his third birthday he's given a white and red lacquered tin drum and is told one day he'll be as tall as his assumed father Alfred (Adorf). Oskar becomes so disgusted with the decadence and hypocrisy of the adult world that he decides right then and there to never grow up. To everyone's surprise he doesn't; and goes through his life in the body of a three-year-old. Armed only with his tin drum and a piercing scream that can shatter glass, Oskar goes through his peculiar life as the Nazis grow in prominence, gain power, and use Danzig as a pretense to invade Poland in 1939.The Tin Drum makes a lot of political proclamations and overtures using Oskar as a siren against Fascism. Oskar's mother Agnes (Winkler) is meant to represent the German population of Danzig who are seduced by German Nationalism yet choose to underplay its consequences. Within the span of a decade, Oskar and Agnes familiarize themselves with three men; the husband Alfred who embraces Nazism, Jan (Olbrychski), the families Polish cousin (and Oskar's possible father) who stands against them, and Markus a Jewish toy merchant who supplies Oskar with all his drums. All three men are infatuated with Agnes but hardly treat her as an equal. Jan lusts for her and she obliges him with regular rendezvous at a seedy hotel until she suddenly becomes pregnant and is distraught over the implications.It is established early on that Oskar is an unreliable narrator with mischievous ends. His plan to stay young is a narrative tool of magical realism which seeps into the story whenever Oskar plays his drum. The results are darkly humorous such as when an entire Nazi rally is interrupted by Oskar's incessant tapping. The crowd of dedicated Nazis suddenly break into a waltz instead of saluting a popular dignitary. Other details are exaggerated to fit the perspective of a particularly nasty little child especially when scenes are projected by an omnipotent perspective. In one scene Agnes and Jan make love while Oskar spies from the top of a church spire. He can't see but we can see Jan's awkward gyrations and Agnes's earth-shattering screams mimicking what a six-year-old might think sex is.This is where the film starts to become thoroughly unpleasant. If meant as political allegory, the film is sub-par but taken as a complex yarn of psychological spectra, the film is simultaneously brilliant and an uncomfortable watch. Is Oskar really a fully-realized adult when he exits the womb? If so, are we meant to root for him as he tortures the adults around him in much the same way a scientist would a lab rat? Oskar never "grows up" biologically, yet emotionally his character arc bends like that of a coming-of-age tale, right down to his sexual awakening and rebellious teenage years. Depending on your perspective these stories are the recollections of a small brat with a drum or the repressed memories of a young dwarf's life torn asunder by callousness and absurdity.It's heavily insinuated Oskar is affected by dwarfism and not actually a physical child for twenty-some years. When Oskar comes face to face with a gaggle of circus folk he finds a kindred spirit in Berba (Hakl) a performer who says he too has "chosen" to stay little. Despite knowing this however, actor David Bennent was only eleven when he starred in The Tin Drum, thus your ability to stomach Oskar's sexual experimentation in the hands of flirtatious Maria (Thalbach) (who was 25) is dependent on your suspension of disbelief. I for one find these scenes distressing especially when he uses his stature to his advantage.I put The Tin Drum on the same ballpark as Schindler's List (1993), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Requiem for a Dream (2000). It's a movie you should see because it challenges your assumptions, makes bold artistic choices and has something important to say. Additionally it says what it needs to in a package that, granted isn't easily digestible but will leave an impact long after watching. It's also a movie the average movie-goer should only watch once in a lifetime.

gizmomogwai As winner of the Foreign Language Oscar for 1979, The Tin Drum has been on my list of movies to look out for for a while. It's a lot stranger than I anticipated- possibly more unconventional than the winner of the same award for 1978, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. Say the movie is a coming-of-age tale of a boy living before and during World War II in Poland, and yeah, you'd think it'd be fairly typical. Now say the protagonist never grows more than he was at age three, screams so high he can shatter glass whenever you try to take his drum away, and that his mom dies from an addiction to eating raw fish- and you'd say, what is this?The Tin Drum is a surreal dark comedy that is often more unusual than funny, but it is, generally, interesting and enjoyable to watch. You just have to be willing to accept a protagonist who isn't totally likable. Oskar's screaming actually hurt my ears, his drumming creates disruptions, he doesn't seem to mourn his parents' deaths, and despite some glimpses into the Nazis' cruelty, doesn't seem to have any problem with entertaining German troops. What this movie has to offer is a view of history, and life generally, quite possibly unlike any other. There is some colour, some laughs, some tragedy, and some eroticism, making for competent storytelling. Do I agree this is the best foreign language movie of 1979? I'd go with Tarkovsky's Stalker. But this is a movie worth seeing.

billcr12 And now for something completely different. A German tale as told by Oskar, while at a mental hospital in the early 1950s. The boy ever grows up and has the ability to scream so loudly that he can shatter glass and knock people down with it. He is a child prodigy with adult intellect in a forever small body. He claims two fathers, Alfred, a Nazi married to his mother, and Jan, a Polish man executed by the Germans during the invasion of Poland.He becomes a carnival entertainer with a group of other dwarfs during the war, and when his girlfriend is killed, he returns to Danzig where he leads a criminal gang. The Russians soon take over and shoot Alfred. Oskar had stopped playing the drum after Alfred's death but starts playing again with two other musicians, and they become a successful jazz band. He is walking through a field and finds the finger of a girl he was in love with and becomes involved in her murder investigation. The whole story is told from Oskar's perspective. The Tin Drum is a very unusual experience.

tieman64 "The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet. When they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round." - Elizabeth Bowen Volker Schlondorff's "The Tin Drum" stars David Bennent as Oskar Matzerath, a young boy growing up in 1920s Danzig (a city which once straddled the border between Germany and Poland). Because he's possessed an adult's (somewhat pessimistic) awareness since birth, Oskar begins to develop a deep hatred of humanity. Oskar thus decides to not advance beyond the age of three. He will not grow up in this world, and instead spends his days banging loudly on a tin drum as a show of protest.Oskar is initially painted as history's moral objector. He sees what others don't and protests what others keenly follow. Quickly, however, Oskar's drumming becomes Schlondorff's blunt metaphor for ineffectual artisans. Oskar drums and screams, but no one listens. Nazisim gathers steam, Poland is invaded, Germany's "economic miracle" occurs, and he becomes a witness to much adultery, cruelty and horror.Oskar himself becomes increasingly amoral. His body may preserve an outward innocence, but inside he grows self absorbed and cruel. And so though Oskar interrupts Nazy rallies and sympathises with the Jewish man who sold him a tin drum (and who is later killed during "Kristallnacht", the "Night of the Broken Glass", upon which the Nazis destroyed Jewish stores and synagogues), he is nevertheless quick to don a Nazi uniform and play his drum for Nazi officials.By the film's end, Oskar epitomises every man infantalized by, or made an obedient child to, the tides of history. "I prefer to be a spectator, not an artist," Oskar says. He's adopted a tone of total futility, and comes to believe that imagination, action and conviction are all inadequate in the fight against place, time and political currents. But while this is Oskar's belief – he later throws his drum away altogether – it is not something Schlondorff necessarily affirms. Oskar's drumming is shown to have the power to destabilise. In one of his more successful protests, an entire Nazi band is led into confusion by his boisterous percussion.Like the works of Wojciech Has, Schlondorff's tone here is a strange blend of surrealism, fantasy, farce, tragedy and much queasy imagery. Oskar himself has the face of a gnome, and his antics are frequently nauseating. The film also makes heavy use of symbolism, many of its major points conveyed obliquely. For example, Oskar is shown to be born in 1924, the year when Germany's economy began its post WW1 climb. On Oskar's third birthday the country's economic stability is then aligned with the child's own refusal to progress, a stagnation which echoes Germany's suspension of democratic and liberal freedoms. Oskar's drum is even shown to be threatened with a "silencing" on his sixth birthday, which occurs in 1933, the year the Nazis came into power, symbolising Nazism's quest to silence all dissenters.Other issues are raised almost imperceptibly. A throwaway line, in which one character states that he was not present for "Kristallnacht", highlights a stance which was common in Germany after the war: "it happened but I was not there; I did not participate". Meanwhile, Oskar's own uncle is quick to replace a picture of Beethoven with Hitler when the Nazi Party comes into power, and replaces it just as quickly when the Nazi's are defeated. He is the "everyday" Nazi, his allegiances blowing with the winds of change.One of the most disturbing passages in the film revolves around fishermen plucking eels from a dead horse's head, a sequence which mirrors the eating habits of other characters in the film, all of whom are shown to be always munching on seafood. This food is later aligned to the corpses of English sailors sunk in naval battles off the coast of Germany. While Oskar protests, Germany eats her foes (while the country rots from the head down?).Anti-semitism is touched upon openly – Jewish shop-keepers are bullied and driven to suicide – but briefly. More interesting are several sequences in which Oskar damns the Catholic Church for not resisting Hitler (see Costa Gavras' "Amen"). In one of the film's more overt moments, Oskar slaps a statue of Christ and accuses him of not helping. Meanwhile, religion is mirrored to Germany's frenzied, quasi religious adulation for Hitler, whom Oskar calls "the Gas Man", a warped version of Father Christmas. Mirrored to these two national fathers (Christ and Hitler) are Oskar's own two fathers (a Polish and German father), both of whom are condemned to death by Oskar's behaviour. Schlondorff would revisit similar material with his 2004 film, "The Ninth Day".8/10 – See "The Garden of the Finzi Continis", "The Damned", "Seven Beauties", "Special Section" and "Protector".