CRITERION COLLECTION
THE REASON MOST people know about The Tin Drum nowadays is because a group of zealots in Oklahoma decided it was kiddie porn and banned it. They finally got around to this nearly 20 years after the film was released.
After winning the 1979 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, The Tin Drum, surprisingly enough, actually played Green Bay. It only played for a week. I went every single night, and four of those nights I was the only one in the theater. It didn't strike me as kiddie porn then, nor does it now. It's a brilliant piece of filmmaking that can be nasty and ugly and often cruel, but it ain't porn.
Adapted from Günter Grass' novel, The Tin Drum tells the story of Oskar Matzerath, who was born in Germany in the years just prior to the Nazis' rise to power. Wise beyond his years, he's mortified by the hypocrisy and stupidity of adults. In response, he decides to remain a child forever, and stops growing. He also has two tools at his disposal—a tin drum, which he uses as a weapon of disruption, and a scream that can shatter glass, which he lets loose whenever anyone tries to remove his drum from him.
So equipped, Oskar moves through the Nazi years as a child, watching the world around him go mad. He witnesses his mother's suicide, befriends a doomed Jewish toymaker and joins the circus.
It's a movie filled with disturbing images—the famous "horsehead full of eels" shot, Oskar's father choking on a Nazi party pin, and of course the "kiddie porn." Those brief scenes are peppered throughout a sprawling, grim, surreal, almost completely hopeless masterpiece that I love as much now (though for different reasons) as I did when I was 14. My favorite scene remains the local Nazi rally that, with the help of Oskar and his drum, gets turned on its head.
I paid $100 for a VHS copy of this back in 1988, and it's been long unavailable in any format for years (likely because of that ban). But God bless the Criterion people for bringing it back as a two-disc special edition.
The second disc contains snippets from cast and crew interviews on French tv; footage of Schlondorff awaiting the results at Cannes; a novel/film comparison, with Grass reading aloud over the rally scene; and the script of the film's original (unfilmed) ending.
The centerpiece, however, is an hour-long documentary about the Oklahoma controversy, containing interviews with the people behind the ban, members of the local ACLU, politicians and the guy who had police bust into his home to confiscate his rented copy. Nobody in this thing comes off looking too good, but I'm just glad that we're all free to watch it again. For now, at least.
JIM KNIPFEL
