The Tin Drum

One of the benefits, or detriments, of aging is that I can see a movie a second time and, since I can't remember much about it from the first viewing, it's like seeing it for the first time again. So is the case with The Tin Drum, a film from 1979 that I saw in college and remembered very little, other than it was about a boy who refused to stop growing.

During my series of posts on the films of Jean-Claude Carriere I had wanted to see this, since he was one of the screenwriters, but it was unavailable. Better late than never. It was a major film, winning the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and a major hit in its native country of Germany. But upon watching it yesterday I had a strange feeling--it hasn't dated well, because its shocks are not so shocking anymore.

The story, adapted from the novel by Gunter Grass, takes place in Germany after World War I and leading up to and during World War II in Danzig, a city that is today in Poland but then was a kind of nebulous area, claimed by Germany.

Our narrator is Oskar, who takes us back to his mother's conception, which occurred in a potato field when an arsonist, his grandfather, hid from authorities under his grandmother's skirts. Oskar, on his third birthday, receives a tin drum, which for the next several years he will not let go of. He also has a talent of emitting a high-pitch scream that can break glass. On that fateful third birthday, he also decides, upon seeing the foolishness of adults, that he will not grow any more, and stages an accident to give it a cause.

Oskar then has a series of peripatetic adventures. His mother has an affair with her cousin, a Pole, and he watches them have sex through a window. He befriends a Jewish toy merchant. When the war starts, he is in the very first battle, September 1, 1939. During the war he joins a group of little people who are a kind of Nazi version of the USO.

Most controversially, he has sex. The actor playing Oskar, David Bennent, was actually eleven during filming. But he has a sex scene with the teenage girl his father has hired at his grocery (she is introduced while holding a pair of cabbages in front of her). This ignited all sorts of child pornography indignations.

While this may seem shocking even today, it seems more designed for a wink and a nudge than anything meaningful. Director Volker Schlondorff has made this a very black comedy, and it is indeed often macabrely funny, especially the way Oskar sets his father up for death late in the film. But I couldn't help but feel unsatisfied, in that I don't think it has anything profound to say about why Germany went so wrong. I suspect Grass's novel is clearer, especially on the metaphor of the tin drum, which in the film is just a prop.

Of the many hundreds of films made about Germany during the rise and fall of the Nazis, this one is not near the top of the list.