Oskar Matzerath was born in Germany in 1921. On his third birthday his parents give him a tin drum. Oskar is smarter than your average three-year-old. When observes the adults around him, he is disgusted. He swears he will remain a three-year-old for the rest of his life and never grow another inch. To make it happen, he purposely falls down the basement stairs and hits his head. Sure enough, he never grows older or bigger again. When the world around him becomes unbearable, he simply beats his drum savagely and out of step. If anyone threatens to take away his toy, he screams with a high pitch that can literally shatter glass. Oskar is definitely a freak.
Around him, Germany deteriorates as the Nazis gain power. The world comes to pieces. Somehow, Oskar survives, protected by his own weirdness, as the whole world goes mad.
The Tin Drum was adapted in 1979 by Volker Schlöndorff from Günter Grass’ allegorical novel, die Blechtrommel. It was a difficult movie to watch. I read the novel die Blechtrommel in its original German version many decades ago and I only remembered two main things about it: (1) it was about a dwarf and (2) it was a masterful novel, one of the best I had ever read.
I felt the movie was awkward and the acting was terrible, particularly that of the protagonist Oskar (David Bennent). Bennent was 12 years old in 1979 when he played the three-year-old Oskar. Bennent is 5’1″ today at age 47. The story was stilted, often narrated by Oskar, and sometimes way too slow. The original German was difficult to understand, often mumbled and too fuzzy to follow. I found myself reading the subtitles most of the time to keep up with the dialog. 163 minutes long, I felt it was too long, too drawn out and at times just boring.
These were my feelings when I turned it off – I didn’t think I’d recommend it to anyone. However, there is more here than meets the eye, and besides being slow, awkward, and clumsy, The Tin Drum is also extremely controversial, shocking, surreal, naïve, and of course, miserable to experience since it deals with the German crimes against its own people in the first half of the 20th century.
The movie won the 1979 Oscar for Best Foreign Film – which I didn’t know when I watched it and only found out later as I read the reviews.
Oskar won an Oscar.
The Germans do not only know how to mess up a country and a continent (see what the Nazis did) but they also know how to make films that make you quite uncomfortable watching.
Oskar is supposedly three years old, but he is actually 10, 12, 16 and 21 years old in the body of a three-year-old at the end of the movie. When he is 16, he falls in lust with the 16-year-old housemaid his father hires. This leads to sex scenes, which are unlike any we ever see in American movies. Here are a couple of pictures:
This, of course, was quite controversial in Germany in the 1970s. The movie ended up one of the most financially successful ones of the decade. In the somewhat more prude America, this didn’t work out quite the same, and caused a censorship controversy in the late 1990s when some U.S. videotapes were confiscated due the alleged violations of child pornography statutes.
To be consistent with my movie rating key, I must stay with my first instinct:
However, to experience a truly different, awkward to watch, controversy-laden, 35-year-old Oscar-winning movie, you might just do yourself a favor and rent The Tin Drum.