Word: tinning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
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...
...over-consumption of fish, Oskar's valiant attempts at sex, cemetaries, the death-dealing Nazi-party pin. Yet unlike Grass' novel, Schlondorff's film refuses to tie these ugly images together; time has strange dimensions and the laudably meticulous attention to detail--violent and spectacular--leaves us empty. The Tin Drum is full of disturbing moments: Oskar is forced to drink a stone and urine soup; eels slither from the mouth of a slimy horse head; a hand pokes out of a coffin made of packing crates. These images fade in time, however, unlike the icy symbolism of Fassbinder...
...film on three adjectives: barbaric, mystical, bored. But if Schlondorff had kept those words in mind as he guided his camera over the russet rooftops of Old Danzig, he might have crafted a film that captured the anguish of the 20th Century as well as Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum...
...woman burning with fitful passions. As a teasing agent provocateur of sex, Nadezhda, played with sensual animal magnetism by Sheila Allen, is a queen bee killer. Her husband, Monakhov (Brian Murray), whom she loathes, pleads for her love, holding his spectacles in his hand like a beggar with a tin cup. The seemingly amour-proof Tsyganov offers to sweep her off to Paris and is crushed by her cruel rebuke that at 49, he is disgustingly old. Under Cherkoon's touch, however, Nadezhda becomes an emotional tinderbox. Cherkoon has already enjoyed the favors of Lydia (Roxanne Hart), an achingly...