The Tin Drum (1979)

Original title

Die Blechtrommel

Directed by

Volker Schlöndorff

Genre

drama film, war film

Country

Germany, France

Runtime

2h 42m

Rated

R

Rating

7.0 of 10 from 537 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

In 1920s Danzig, a boy named Oskar decides to stop growing and remains child-sized into adulthood. He uses his tin drum to express anger and watch the absurd cruelty of adults around him as Nazi rule takes hold.

darkly comicwhimsicalunsettlingmelancholicsurrealbittersweetintimatedisturbing

What happens

The Tin Drum (German: Die Blechtrommel) is a 1979 anti-war film adapted from Günter Grass's 1959 novel, directed by Volker Schlöndorff from a screenplay co-written by Schlöndorff, Jean-Claude Carrière, and Franz Seitz. It stars Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, Katharina Thalbach, Daniel Olbrychski, and Charles Aznavour, with David Bennent in the lead role of Oskar Matzerath, a young boy who willfully arrests his own physical development and remains in the body of a child even as he enters adulthood. A darkly comic war drama with magical realist elements, the film follows Oskar, a precocious child living in Danzig, who wields seemingly preternatural abilities. He lives in contempt of the adults around him and witnesses firsthand their potential for cruelty, first via the rise of the Nazi Party and then the subsequent war. The title refers to Oskar's toy drum, which he loudly plays whenever he is displeased or upset. The German-language film was a co-production of West German, French, and Yugoslavian companies. The film won the Palme d'Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival and was a major financial success in West Germany, where it won the German Film Award for Best Fiction Film. It was received more controversially internationally, and was targeted by censorship campaigns in Ireland, Canada, and the United States. Despite the notoriety, the film won Best Foreign Language Film at the 1980 Academy Awards. In 2003, The New York Times placed the film on its Best 1000 Movies Ever list. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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