Gunter Grass's internationally popular 1959 novel The Tin Drum has been translated into a lusty, volatile, surreal, and chilling view of the rise and the fall of the Third Reich. The film shared top honors with Apocalypse Now at last year's Cannes Film Festival. Set in Danzig shortly before World War II, the story conveys the conditions which led to the epoch of National Socialism with its racism, barbarity, and rampant evil. As in all provocative works of art, this one also operates on another level as well. It is a creative portrait of a loner who literally marches to the beat of his own drum. The impish protagonist the film stands for the child-artist in all of us.
Young Oskar (David Bennent) is the son of Alfred Matzerath (Mario Adorf) and his promiscuous wife (Angela Winkler) who is carrying on a passionate affair with Jan Bronski (Daniel Olbrychski), a Polish postal worker. At the age of three, Oskar willfully decides to separate himself from the world he has been born into — he stops growing and stages a fall; his parents think the tumble causes physical retardations. The young boy demonstrates his rage by a shrill shriek that can break glass. Rejected by family and peers, Oskar is a roving eye, a Lilliputian with a drum that he always carries to beat out his rebellious urges. One of the best scenes in the movie feature Oskar hiding beneath the bleachers at a Nazi rally. His playing leads the band into a waltz number instead of the German hymn they are supposed to be performing.
Agnes's guilt over her affair eventually drives her to suicide. It doesn't make much difference since her husband is not a loyal Nazi. Oskar tires to emulate his mother's sexuality by toying with the peasant girl who has been hired to take care of him. However, he finds out that his father has already bedded her; when she becomes pregnant, Alfred is forced to marry her.
Jan Bronski is killed by German soldiers during a resistance stand by Polish citizens at the post office; these were the first shots fired in World War II. Oskar joins a band of midgets who perform theatrical pieces for the decadent Nazis — here he learns how to survive through role-playing. By the time he returns home, the war is nearly over. His father is killed by the Russians and Oskar decides to symbolically begin his life anew by ending it.
The Tin Drum is a richly textured film propelled by the astonishing performance of David Bennent. The boy is by turns demonic, prophetic, innocent, and amoral. The screenplay portrays the vacuousness of German middle-class culture and its susceptibility to the rigors and transcendentalism of Nazism. It stands with Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun as one of the finest German films of the 1970s.