The Tin Drum

There was no way to make a film based on "The Tin Drum" by Günter Grass without making it on a grand scale -- world history lived by and seen through the eyes of its hero, Oskar. He comes into the world in Dantzig, 1924. As an incredibly precocious infant, Oskar views the observations of those around him with clairvoyant skepticism. On his third birthday - as a gesture of absolute protest - Oskar abruptly resolves never to grow up. A deliberate fall covers the real reason for his extraordinary condition in the eyes of both family and doctors. Banging on his tin drum, Oskar gives pulse to all the events that rattle him to the core. As a rebel, he abuses a piercing shriek, which can shatter glass and be used as a weapon. As a charmer, he sets out to impregnate the teenager who is to become his stepmother and takes up with the fascinating midget Roswitha Raguna. As an artist, along with his circus friends, he performs with armed forces theater on fronts all the way to the Atlantic Wall. He sees both his presumptive fathers off to their graves and is not entirely innocent of his mother's peculiar demise. Could there, indeed, be something downright diabolical about Oskar? Because the running time of the film Volker Schlöndorff had envisaged exceeded that stipulated in the initial distribution agreement, he was forced to cut it down by half an hour. The remastered director's cut presents for the first time the film he had originally intended to make.