FireBlade DVD Review: The Tin Drum

Review by Jerry Stratton, 5/24/1999

A strange German fantasy taking place between World War I and the end of World War II, about a young boy who refuses to grow up.

Recommendation: Rent

Director: Volker Schlöndorff

Writer: Jean-Claude Carrière, Günter Grass, Volker Schlöndorff, Franz Seitz

Format:	Letterbox

Last Memo: Unknown
Movie: 7
Transfer Quality: 6
Overall Rating: 6

Features
Storyboards:	5

“Die Blechtrommel”, or “The Tin Drum”, is an oddly disturbing movie. Young Oskar Metzerath (David Bennent) is born aware, knows from birth that he will receive a tin drum on his third birthday, and sometime later decides that growing to adulthood is a very bad idea and stops himself from doing so. He stays a child for something on twenty years, through World War II. He is in Danzig, and lives through the German takeover, both of Danzig and of Poland. During the war, he joins a troupe of others like him, who travel around France entertaining the German troops.

The DVD also contains some illustrations used in the production of the movie for storyboarding. They’re quite interesting, if mostly unreadable. It is interesting to watch the scribbles that guided the shots.

Recommendation: Rent

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Spoken Languages: German			Feature List
Subtitled Languages: English
Other items of interest: The Ruling Class; Cabaret; Cinema Paradiso; City of Lost Children; Tampopo; The Bicycle Thief; Fahrenheit 451; King of Hearts; The Seven Samurai; Tokyo Drifter; Hitler’s Last Courier; Memoirs Found in a Bathtub; The Desert Peach;

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Jerry

In 1993, the day after the bombing of the World Trade Center, the serial killer known only as the Quiet Man began his reign of terror in the Washington, DC area.

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