The Tin Drum (1979)
 Very occasionally a movie comes along that is so unique that it
eludes conventional criticism. Such a movie is The Tin Drum,
a German film which won the Grand Prize at the 1979 Cannes Film
Festival (an honour shared with Apocalypse Now).
This genuine masterpiece was adapted from a 493-page novel by
Gunter Grass which is all but impossible to describe (It took
sixteen years to get the book adapted for the screen!).
The Tin Drum describes the harrowing misfortunes of the
people of Danzig before, during, and after Hitler's seizure of the
city, seen through the eyes of Oskar, a dwarf who defiantly beats
a toy drum as a symbol of protest.
Born in 1924, he was a rebel from the start - There is a scene
inside his mother's womb during childbirth, when Oskar peers out,
refusing to enter the delivery room. When the family doctor
attempts to examine him, foetuses, snakes, and salamanders explode
from their jars of formaldehyde, splattering the room with acid
and glass.
It is evident from the beginning that Oskar is no ordinary
child. On his third birthday, Oskar decides never to join the
world of foolish grown-ups, so he takes his birthday present - a
red and white snare drum - and throws himself down a flight of
stairs.
 As
the years pass, Oskar remains the size of a midget, banging his
drum to acknowledge the events that pass across the retina of his
eye and developing a scream so horrible and deafening that nobody
dares to take his drum away.
For the rest of the film, he never grows any larger.
When Poland falls and World War II begins, he beats his drum
and the Nazi parades change tempo, forcing the storm troopers and
brown-shirts to waltz to the Blue Danube.
His mother commits suicide eating raw fish because she doesn't
want another child like this one. His father dies strangling on a
swastika pin (his coffin is a bandage of grocery bags).
Oskar survives them all because he is ageless. His eyes are the
pages on which history is written. He is indestructible.
Travelling through war-ravaged Europe with a circus troupe of
performing gnomes, he makes his servant girl pregnant, is almost
murdered by his own child, and seems to be a wise man in a world
gone insane.
At various times, Director Volker Schlöndorff considered
filming The Tin Drum with midgets and with Dustin Hoffman
in the role of Oskar. But the biggest miracle of all in bringing
this movie off, was in the ultimate casting of a young teenager
named David Bennett in the role of Oskar.
 Bug-eyed
and repellent, this bizarre child suffers in real life from the
same physical malfunction as the dwarf in the story.
But he doesn't rely merely on external weirdness. As the
new-born infant, as a three-year-old, and as an old man, he seems
haunted by the gallows humour of the role.
Watching a Nazi rally through a hole in the wall or crawling
through the attack on the Polish post office, using the frantic
assaults on his drum as both a link and a barrier between himself
and reality.
The Tin Drum is a film unlike anything you have seen
before. Like the novel, it has provoked great argument and
controversy, but it is a cinematic work of art that must be seen .
. . and seen again.
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