Banging the drum

10 April 2012

It's seldom that a movie is so sexually adventurous that it has critics standing in the street after seeing it, unwilling to disperse until they've threshed out its merits. That happened last - as I recall - at Cannes in 1979. The French police, nervous (as ever) about such manifestations, asked us all politely but firmly to 'circulez'.

They'd have been even more perturbed if they'd stopped to listen to us. What everyone was arguing about was the age of the 'child' in Volker Schl?ndorff's film The Tin Drum. 'He was a 30-year-old midget.' - 'No, he wasn't, he was just an ordinary kid.' - 'Well, if he was just a kid, he was well in advance of his age.' The debate raged. To us British, it was maybe of more than academic or artistic interest. The age of David Bennent, who plays Oskar, the young hero of G?nter Grass's novel, would determine whether the film would fall foul of the 1978 Protection Of Children Act.

Set in German-speaking Danzig, from 1924 to 1944, The Tin Drum is the story of a baby boy who comes out of the womb - a shockingly effective bit of subjective photography - and grows up in Hitler's Germany as a bundle of stubborn, sometimes malevolent energy. Then he stops growing: a voluntary act to denote his hatred of the society he's been born into. But refusing to put away childish things, he acquires a tin drum that he uses to beat out revolt in the name of children everywhere, and punctuate the oppressive excesses of the Nazis. An uncanny power to shatter glass with a bad-tempered scream makes Oskar feared in his family and around the town.

He also develops an eroticism breathtakingly in keeping with his aggressive impulses, but not his apparently childish years - that's where the British censor had trouble. In a scene that had the entire cinema in Cannes wondering almost audibly how far it would go, Oskar impulsively performs an act that - in those days - was generally associated with adults of a peculiarly enquiring disposition. As this polymorphously perverse phenomenon, David Bennent, who actually turned out to be a 13-year-old with the physique of an eight-year-old, uses an enhanced vocal power and possesses alarmingly thyroid eyes that would have made even Bette Davis blink.

The film's post-Cannes fate is now history, of course: it did get a British screening, with a very small trim, I am told, which kept it on the judicious side of the indecency defined by the Protection Of Children Act. It's being shown here in the original German, with English subtitles. Despite the altered status of Germany today, it's still a work of great inflammatory power, bizarre visuals and a passion that's held responsibly in check by Schl?ndorff's aim to portray a nation which made a freakish swerve into self-destruction. It shared (with Apocalypse Now) the Palme d'Or at Cannes, which is really something to beat the drum about.

The Tin Drum
Cert: 18

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in