The Tin Drum (1979) He Bangs the Drum (Review)

I guess there’s something symbiotic in the fact that, in the month in which Donald Trump’s presidency ends in acrimony, scandalous insurrection and a historic second impeachment, the two reviews I have been asked to write here at The Geek Show have been The Don is Dead and The Tin Drum. The former’s ironic title hopefully signals an end to what the latter film charts, the rise of populist fascism.

Released to the Criterion label on the 18th January, The Tin Drum is celebrated German New Wave filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff’s 1979 adaptation of the 1959 novel of the same name by Günter Grass. Extremely popular upon its release, The Tin Drum became one of the most financially successful German films of the 1970s, taking some 25 millions marks ($13million) at the box office and, with takings of $4million gross in the US, went on to beat Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 movie The Marriage of Maria Braun as the highest grossing German film released in America. Commercial success was matched by critical praise as the film memorably went on to share the Palme d’Or with Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now at Cannes in 1979, and took home the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1980 Academy Awards. It’s status as a modern classic looked set to be assured – but then something happened to threaten all that; firstly in Ontario and later in Oklahoma.

To place what happened in context it’s important to discuss the movie. The film tells the story of Oskar, an Austrian boy who, on his third birthday in 1927, receives the eponymous tin drum. From that point onward, Oskar refuses to grow up and communicates largely through the endless beating of the drum and a series of high-pitched screams which have the ability to break glass. His decision arises because he views the world around him a cruel place populated by hypocritical and irresponsible adults. In Oskar’s logic, why should he grow up to become like them? This arrested development, whilst perfectly realised on the printed page, posed something of an intriguing challenge to the production, one which Schlöndorff navigated by casting the diminutive, blonde-haired eleven-year-old Swiss actor David Bennent in the central role of Oskar through every stage of the boy’s life, from his birth in 1924 to his decision to finally mature following the end of World War Two. This is a great idea, but it appears ignorant of what some the experiences Bennent was supposed to recreate for the narrative, specifically Oskar’s burgeoning sexual experiences. At sixteen, Oskar loses his virginity to Maria Matzerath, who is also the lover of his father, Alfred (Mario Adorf). Maria is also sixteen, but she is a fully developed sixteen-year-old as opposed to a sixteen-year-old supposedly stunted at the age of three and played by an eleven-year-old child actor. Where matters get more murky lie in the fact that Maria was played by Katharina Thalbach, who as twenty-four at the time of filming. So what we essentially witness here is Schlöndorff directing a scene in which an eleven-year-old actor appears to be having oral sex and intercourse with a twenty-four-year-old actor.

The Ontario Board of Censors, upon viewing The Tin Drum, were greatly concerned by this sequence. Initially, the censors cut Schlöndorff’s film but, following further dissatisfaction, they opted to ban the film on the grounds of child pornography. This controversy was repeated seventeen years later when the district court judge for the state of Oklahoma, Richard Freeman (who, it is alleged, viewed just this one scene of the 160-minute film), found The Tin Drum guilty of Oklahoma State’s obscenity laws in its depiction of underage sexuality and requested that all copies of the film be confiscated. As a result, one person who had rented the film from his local video store, was threatened with prosecution, whilst a member of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the Oklahoma PD, alleging that the tape had been illegally confiscated and his rights infringed. Ultimately, the controversy brought about high-profile discussions about the merits of the film as a whole and the film was eventually vindicated whilst the judge’s role as censor condemned. By 2001, all the cases had been settled and the film is now legally available in Oklahoma County.

But controversy and praise aside, is The Tin Drum really a classic? Well, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that the contemporary praise wasn’t universal; not everyone was banging the drum. Critics such as Vincent Canby of The New York Times felt that Schlöndorff’s adaptation paled in comparison to Grass’ original novel, opining that it “has no real life of its own. There are a number of things seen or said on the screen that, I suspect, will not make much sense to anyone who isn’t familiar with the novel”, whilst Roger Ebert gave it two out of four stars in his Chicago Sun-Times review, memorably arguing “My problem is that I kept seeing Oskar not as a symbol of courage but as an unsavory brat; the film’s foreground obscured its larger meaning” This is actually quite close to my own opinion of the film but, unlike Ebert, I do not view it as a flaw or offer it as a criticism. I think Oskar’s persona is meant to be thus, after all I believe in the novel that he is an unreliable narrator. I think that what Schlöndorff tried to do with Oskar was depict a contradictory figure that somehow serves as a wider metaphor for the conflict of WWII. Little Austrian Oskar, despite his striking Aryan looks isn’t ‘pure’ as the Nazis would demand. His parentage is dubious, with his mother Agnes (Angela Winkler) having a long affair with Polish postal worker Jan Bronski (Daniel Olbrychski). Being neither one nor the other, Oskar represents the inherent flaw within the Third Reich and exists on the precipice of the devastation they exacted. Observing and condemning it all yes, but also contributing in his own small, vindictive part too. I think this dichotomy is best achieved in two significant sequences within the film.

The first of these is the now rather iconic Nazi rally scene. Hiding beneath the wooden benches of the outdoor uncovered stand, Oskar begins to bang his drum; a contrasting metronomic beat from this mischievous gnomic figure that begins to confuse the assembled band of brownshirts. Slowly but surely, one by one, their musical accompaniment for the rally strays and finally mutates into a full-blown waltz. In that moment, the spectators give in to the innate pleasure of this more innocuous, fun-loving music and they proceed to dance together, leaving the Nazi spokesman out in the rain – quite literally, as a downpour develops – with Oskar having rained on his parade. It’s a joyous, satirical moment and Schlöndorff choreographs the chaos beautifully. The meaning is clear; this is a courageous little act of rebellion from Oskar who has seen the pomposity and hypocrisy of the rising Third Reich and decided it deserves his contempt. Ensconced under the benches, almost like a little sprite or hobgoblin, he cannot see the effects of his small act of dissent, but he can hear it and he is happy.

The second scene plays more into the brattish, complicit element of Oskar that Ebert struggled to shake and it is the scene in which Oskar, having barged in on his father Alfred having intercourse with Maria (an intrusion which makes Alfred ejaculate inside the girl), subsequently punches Maria in the groin as she attempts to rinse out the deposited semen. In this moment we see what Ebert referred to as “a malevolence that seems to burn from his eyes” and we realise that Oskar, despite his refusal to mature and engage with adult society, is nevertheless just as brutal and callous as those grown-ups he despises. In that moment we understand that halting your physical maturity does not preserve the innocence of your childhood. that such a perfect, untouched state can never last. It is only when, in the dying days of WWII and confronted by the death of those closest to him, including Alfred (and again, ugly complicity rears its head as, in this directors cut, Oskar hands his father the Nazi pin which he tries to swallow before the Russian soldiers murderously advance upon their hideout) that the stunted boy realises he must accept the culpability of his actions and finally grow up.

There’s a lot I admire about The Tin Drum, and a lot I dislike too. It’s sometimes a hard watch, it’s subject matter alone necessitating this long before the stomach-churning vision of Oskar’s pregnant mother bingeing on raw fish, but Schlöndorff delivers an eccentric, sprawling epic that defied the odds of adapting a virtually unfilmable novel and was rightly lauded upon its release. I think, as time passes, it is a film that loses some of its power by virtue of many other German filmmakers exploring the same recent, controversial history in an effort to heal themselves. Many of these films, it can be argued, with more cohesively satisfying results. But it’s important to remember that The Tin Drum remains arguably the first and that is perhaps why it was so praised. It’s reach too cannot be denied and the films that followed, along with the recent Jo Jo Rabbit, surely testifies to that.

Thank you for reading Mark’s Review of The Tin Drum

Check out our new film and music podcast, Pop Screen! Find it on all good podcast apps… like Spotify