Word: tin
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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...
Little Oskar's story makes a fine scenario and Tin Drum is marvelously entertaining, even engrossing at times. Yet a question persists: why make this film? Must every literary classic stumble shell-shocked onto the screen? Time and a host of bad adaptations have shown that literature and cinema are not compatible cousins, that by their very nature, good novels will not make good films, just as the exciting visual effects of film cannot be duplicated in print...
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...