Themes: Life Under Occupation, Political Unrest, Wishes Come True
Main Cast: Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, David Bennent, Daniel Olbrychski, Katharina Thalbach
Release Year: 1979
Country: WG/FR/PL/YU
Run Time: 150 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
In Volker Schlöndorff's award-winning adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass' allegorical novel, David Bennent plays Oskar, the young son of a German rural family, circa 1925. On his third birthday, Oskar receives a shiny new tin drum. At this point, rather than mature into one of the miserable specimens of grown-up humanity that he sees around him, he vows never to get any older or any bigger. Whenever the world around him becomes too much to bear, the boy begins to hammer on his drum; should anyone try to take the toy away from him, he emits an ear-piercing scream that literally shatters glass. As Germany goes to hell during the 1930s and '40s, the never-aging Oskar continues savagely beating his drum, serving as the angry conscience of a world gone mad. The intense and visceral Tin Drum was one of the most financially successful German films of the 1970s and won the 1979 Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the 1979 Golden Palm (which it shared with Apocalypse Now). In the late '90s, the film became the center of a censorship controversy when some U.S. videotapes were confiscated because of the film's supposed violation of a child pornography statute. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
The first German film to win the Best Foreign Film Oscar, New German Cinema forefather Volker Schlöndorff's adaptation of The Tin Drum is a potent Fellini-esque epic of intuitive rebellion against a corrupt world. Shot on location in Poland, Germany, and France, the film mixes the palpable reality of ordinary life in prewar and World War II Danzig with the surreal, innocent perspective of stunted boy/man Oskar as he raises instinctive hell against the horrors he witnesses, first in his family and then as the Nazis take over his hometown. Reaching the heights of comedy in a chaotic Nazi rally and the depths of tragedy during the Danzig post-office siege, Oskar's incessant drum-beating and glass-shattering shriek become a powerful, if futile, protest. Twelve-year-old neophyte David Bennent, cast partly for his striking eyes, anchors a superb German cast, while such memorable images as a lone matriarch, grotesque eels, and a midget circus act underscore a society unhinged. Co-winner of Cannes' Palme d'Or (with, appropriately, Apocalypse Now [1979]), The Tin Drum became an international hit and a '90s target for censors in the U.S. Though his film covers only the first two-thirds of Günter Grass' novel, Schlöndorff has refrained from a Tin Drum 2. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
Heinz Bennent - Greff; Fritz Hakl - Bebra, midget; Mariella Oliveri - Raswitha Raguna; Tina Engel - The Young Anna Kollaiczek; Ernst Jacobi - Gauleiter Lobsack; Ilse Page - Gretchen Schemer; Otto Sander - Meyn the Musician; Andréa Ferréol - Lina Graff; Charles Aznavour - Sigismund Markus; Roland Beubner - Joseph Kollaiczek; Wojciech Pszoniak - Faingold; Werner Rehm - Scheffler; Henning Schluter - Dr. Hollatz; Bruno Thost - Private Lankes; Marek Walczewski - Schugger-Leo; Emil Feist - Clown #1; Gerda Blisse - Miss Spollenhauer; Berta Drews - The Old Anna Kollaiczek; Helmut Brasch - Old Heilandt
Credit
Nicos Perakis - Art Director, Dagmar Niefind - Costume Designer, Branko Lustig - First Assistant Director, Volker Schlöndorff - Director, Suzanne Baron - Editor, Maurice Jarre - Composer (Music Score), Friedrich Meyer - Composer (Music Score), Rino Carboni - Makeup, Alfredo Tiberi - Makeup, Igor Luther - Cinematographer, Eberhard Junkersdorf - Production Manager, Franz Seitz - Producer, Anatole Dauman - Producer, Franz Seitz - Screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière - Screenwriter, Volker Schlöndorff - Screenwriter, Günter Grass - Book Author
David Bennent plays Oskar, the young son of a Kashubian family in a rural area of the Free City of Danzig, circa 1925. On his third birthday, Oskar receives a shiny new tin drum. At this point, rather than mature into one of the miserable specimens of grown-up humanity that he sees around him, he vows never to get any bigger. Whenever the world around him becomes too much to bear, the boy begins to hammer on his drum; should anyone try to take the toy away from him, he emits an ear-piercing scream that shatters glass. As Germany evolves towards Nazism and war in the 1930s and 1940s, the unaging Oskar continues savagely beating his drum. Only after the Soviet invasion at the end of the war, when his only surviving family member is killed, does he decide to grow up.
The film features a scene in which Bennent, then 11 years old and playing a stunted 16-year-old, licks effervescent powder (Ahoj-Brause, a German brand of sherbet invented in 1925 and still available as of 2009) from the navel, and performs oral sex on a 16-year-old girl (played by actress Katharina Thalbach, who was 24 years old at the time).
In 1980, the film version of The Tin Drum was first cut, and then banned as child pornography by the Ontario Censor Board in Canada.[2]
Similarly, on June 25, 1997, it was banned following a ruling made by State District Court Judge Richard Freeman, who had reportedly only viewed a single isolated scene of the film, The Tin Drum was banned from Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, citing the state's obscenity laws for portraying underage sexuality. All copies in Oklahoma City were likewise confiscated and at least one person who had rented the film on video tape was threatened with prosecution. Michael Camfield, leader of a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a lawsuit against the police department on July 4, 1997, alleging that the tape had been illegally confiscated and his rights infringed.
This led to a high-profile series of hearings on the film's merits as a whole versus the controversial scene, and the role of the judge as censor. The film emerged vindicated and most copies were returned within a few months.[3][4] By 2001, all the cases had been settled and the film is legally available in Oklahoma County. This incident was covered in the documentary film Banned in Oklahoma which is included in the 2004 Criterion Collection DVD release of The Tin Drum[5].
Baal (1970) ·Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (1971) ·Morals of Ruth Halbfass (1972) ·A Free Woman (1972) ·Übernachtung in Tirol (1974) ·The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) ·Coup de Grâce (1976) ·The Tin Drum (1979)
Nur zum Spaß, nur zum Spiel (1977) ·The Candidate (1980) ·The Michael Nyman Songbook (1992) ·Ein Produzent hat Seele oder er hat keine (2002) ·Billy Wilder Speaks (2006)
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