Word: grassed
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HERE IS The Tin Drum's failure, of course. Intimidated by Grass and by the novel itself, Schlondorff's film is hardly more than a moving picture show, Oskar's treasured photograph album (left out of the film) brought to life. The director has made little attempt to translate aspects of the novel into cinematic language. While Grass' imagination provides an exciting and titillating narrative, Scholondorff only steers his camera earnestly through each sequence, giving Oskar's war-time charades a warm, personal gloss. Schlondorff's Oskar is little Oskar, a cruel, manipulative Peter Pan who ultimately leaves his Never...
...Gunter Grass filled his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), with symbols that are not symbols, with allegories that are not allegories, with messages that are not messages. Volker Scholondorff has turned this sprawling, self-conscious novel of post-war Germany into a beautiful and disturbing film that recreates Danzig of the '30s and '40s without adequately illuminating Grass' novel. His film is both a magnificent success--well-acted, unblinkingly photographed, crisply edited--and a huge failure, an adaptation that dismally dissipates the epic power of the novel...
...Barbaric, Mystical, bored," writes Grass of the 20th Century. Historians will one day recognize The Tin Drum as representative of a universal 20th Century experience, yet Grass' novel is above all a German work, addressing the provincial guilt and unease of post-war Germans, drawn to Hitler like adolescents to pornography and unable to cleanse themselves under the searchlight of vengeful, scrutinizing time...
...Grass' novel is a perrennial best-seller in Germany, a volume of modern myths that has almost Biblical significance for those that lived through The War and knew Nazi Germany; and for the younger generation, for whom the swastika and the "heil" are the lost trapping of a confusing, all too-recent past. Even Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour nightmare, Our Hitler, with its pounding Wagner and Beethoven, acknowledges Oskar's drum. It beats in time to the modern German effort to recreate Hegel's sense of history, Goethe's sense of self, Nietzche's sense of strength...
Movie-making is big business, however, and The Tin Drum was guaranteed of commercial success in Germany because of the novel's popularity. Grass resisted all offers for the film rights to his book for 15 years until he decided he had met, finally, the right man to direct Oskar's story. Schlondorff (whose past films include Young Torless and The Lost Honor of Katherin Blum) asked sharp questions, Grass noted, and made no plans to significantly alter his book for the screen...