That filmmaker turned out to be Volker Schlöndorff, a former assistant for French filmmakers Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Alain Resnais who had emerged as one of the brightest cinematic voices of the New German Cinema in the 1970s. By necessity, Schlöndorff had to reduce the scope of Grass’ story and tone down some of its more bizarre twists, which unfortunately resulted in the loss of some of Grass’ satirical edges. Throughout The Tin Drum, you can tell that the adult world—with its cheating, feuding, lying, hypocrisy, and warmongering—is being satirized, but it never gets much more specific than that. Ultimately, the film is more memorable for its quirky commingling of the epic and the intimate and its often startling visuals than for any of its big themes.

The casting of the forever-childlike protagonist, Oskar Matzerath, was the first major hurdle to leap in adapting Grass’ novel, and Schlöndorff made the perfect choice in casting David Bennett, the son of actor Heinz Bennett, who had appeared in one of the director’s earlier films, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975). Although David Bennett was 12 years old when the film was shot, he had a growth disorder that made him look six or seven years younger. Thus, he was physically perfect for the role, but it is his performance that really sells it. As the film covers some two decades of Oskar’s life, Bennett is required to convey Oskar’s emotional growth from literally the womb to age 20. On top of that, Oskar is an incredibly complex and often contradictory character. At times, we want to empathize with him and other times it is hard not to want to slap him for his childish egocentrism. He is alternately sweet and mean, compelling and shallow, silly and wise.

As Oskar is the film’s center, everything we see is through his unreliable eyes, often quite literally. Even thought his carefree mother, Agnes (Angela Winkler), is married to a burly shopkeeper named Alfred (Mario Adorf), she is in love with her Polish cousin, Jan (Daniel Olbrychski), who very well may be Oskar’s real father. Oskar decides to stop growing on his third birthday in response to the self-absorbed and childlike behavior he witnesses in the adults attending his birthday party. Although he literally wills himself to stop growing, he throws himself down the cellar stairs to provide a convenient medical excuse for his lack of growth.

It is also on his third birthday that he is given the eponymous tin drum, which he will carry with him for the rest of his life. The tin drum is a symbol of his refuge in the body of a child, and he plays it as a way of drowning out the increasingly insane world around him. For reasons that are never explained, he also has the ability to shatter glass with his piercing scream, which further isolates him from the rest of humankind and aligns him with outsiders and fringe-dwellers. This is particularly crucial once the Nazis come to power and seize control of the city of Danzig, where Oskar lives (it is also the city where Grass spent his childhood). The Nazis, after all, are modern history’s primary symbol of the worst levels to which humanity can stoop, and one of the film’s most powerful evocations is the way it highlights the essential childishness of Nazism without ever minimizing the horrors of what it perpetrated.

Throughout the film, Schlöndorff and cinematographer Igor Luther punctuate the film with startling imagery that often borders on the surreal. The tone is set early on when we see Oskar still in his mother’s womb, surrounded in hazy red comfort until he is forced out into the world that he ultimately rejects; the first-person view of the birthing gives us a strong connection to Oskar, even as his voice-over narration plays an amusing counterpoint. There are also scenes of morbid grotesquerie, such as a playful family outing on the beach that ends with a run-in with a fisherman using a decaying horse’s head to catch eels, which eventually results in Agnes committing suicide by literally eating herself to death with fish.

Yet, for all its fantastical exaggerations, one of The Tin Drum’s primary strengths is the way in which Schlöndorff manages to ground it in a realistic texture of lived experience. The surreal and the real clash and commingle throughout the film, most notably in the scene that recreates the battle at the Polish post office in Danzig, which was the official start of World War II. The scene is a meticulous recreation of a well-known historical event, yet Schlöndorff plays it through Oskar’s point of view, which takes us inside the post office and juxtaposes the fevered mania of the Polish rebels’ subversive standoff with Oskar’s single-minded desire for another tin drum, the only thing of real importance to him in the world gone mad.

The Tin Drum is often noted as the film most responsible for announcing the arrival of the German New Wave. It won the 1979 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (the first German film to do so) and also shared the coveted Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. It is certainly an intriguing and highly ambitious film, one of great artistry and even greater chutzpah. Even though its thematic focus is not as honed as its source novel, Schlöndorff’s adaptation is still a remarkable film.

Copyright ©2004 James Kendrick

All images copyright © The Criterion Collection and Argos Films and Seitz GmbH