Synopsis
Oskar Matzerath is a very unusual boy. Refusing to leave the womb until promised a tin drum by his mother, Agnes, Oskar is reluctant to enter a world he sees as filled with hypocrisy and injustice, and vows on his third birthday to never grow up. Miraculously, he gets his wish. As the Nazis rise to power in Danzig, Oskar wills himself to remain a child, beating his tin drum incessantly and screaming in protest at the chaos surrounding him.
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Cast
- Mario AdorfAlfred Matzerath
- Angela WinklerAgnes Matzerath
- David BennentOskar Matzerath
- Katharina ThalbachMaria Matzerath
- Daniel OlbrychskiJan Bronski
- Tina EngelYoung Anna Koljaiczek
- Berta DrewsAnna Koljaiczek
- Roland TeubnerJoseph Koljaiczek
- Tadeusz KunikowskiOnkel Vinzenz
- Andréa FerréolLina Greff
- 100
Slant Magazine
The Tin Drum, adapted from the eponymous novel by Günter Grass, doesn’t cast the story in a new light, though it does deepen a few of its subplots. - 80
Empire
Beautiful to look at, but shot with a cruel and unerring eye, it gives no quarter to the German people for their complicity in events, and in turn disgusts, amazes and frightens. - 75
TV Guide Magazine
The Tin Drum is a disturbing film, rich with black humor, that takes a decidedly bitter and horrific look at the German people. - 75
The A.V. Club
Schlöndorff's Tin Drum, like most adaptations of great literature, serves mostly as a fascinating but superficial gloss on material that just doesn’t lend itself well to visual storytelling. - 70
Newsweek
The film is laudable, but Grass's book was lacerating. [21 Apr 1980, p.90] - 63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
The Schlondorff version of The Tin Drum is never more than an intelligent reduction and simplification of an enormous and complex work of art. [26 Apr 1980] - 60
Time Out
Whether this talent symbolizes racist aggression or mournful shock is left unsettlingly unclear, however, and while Oskar is a sphinxlike contradiction, Schlöndorff has a tendency to sketch the rest of the cast as simple grotesques or symbols of decadence that are unconvincingly humanized in the final third. - 60
Variety
Adheres to the book more than enough not to disappoint avid readers of the bestseller.