On Screen

...Furthermore, Schlondorff, albeit presumably with Grass' approval, chose to adapt only two of the novel's three parts and thus eliminated virtually the entire postwar period...

...In the book, on the other hand, the religious context of the episode—apparent from the chapter title, "Good Friday Fare"—makes both Agnes' revulsion and Matzerath's provocation (she is a practicing Catholic, he is not) understandable...

...Through the crack between the closet doors, we watch along with Oskar as Bronski's soothing gestures turn into sexual caresses, and Agnes' sobs change into cries of ecstasy...

...In one scene, Oskar and the band of performing midgets he has joined during World War II are touring German fortifications on Normandy beach...

...If not for titilla-tion, Schlondorff must have manufactured this episode because he could think of no other way to let us know that Agnes and Bronski were lovers, or to suggest that Oskar knew about them...

...Angela Winkler (who looks like a young Susan Sontag) makes such a compellingly impulsive and guilt-ridden Agnes that our sympathies are engaged, and we cease to view her character from the angle of her all-knowing, all-seeing child...

...Elsewhere in the film, the skillful acting undercuts whatever impulse the director might have had to preserve Grass' detached approach...

...His Oskar is a German Everyman, writ small...

...Throughout the rise of Nazism, the fall of Poland, the destruction of Danzig, domestic strife, and foreign intervention, he maintains a self-conscious deadpan that perfectly expresses Grass' irony toward and skepticism about the workings of history...

...Twelve years old when the film was shot, Bennent somehow convinces us he is at different times an unborn child, a "normal" three-year-old, and an adult inside a three-year-old's body...

...We hear an improbably youthful-sounding narrator named Oskar describe how his mother, Agnes, was conceived in 1899, 25 years before his own birth...

...But Schlondorff has the boy reacting hysterically when the invading Soviet soldiers shoot his legal father—a puzzling betrayal of the spirit of indifference in the novel, which has Oskar casually squashing some lice picked up from the coat of the Russian soldier who was holding him moments before gunning down Matzerath...

...He bangs away on his tin drum and shuns what he perceives as the absurdities of the adult world, particularly his mother's continuing affair with Bronski and the unsettling possibility that the Pole is his real father...

...In both the novel and the movie, Oskar accidentally causes Matzer-ath's death...

...In the novel, the omnipresent "I" of the narrative signals Oskar's omniscience...

...But things start to go awry with the adaptation after Oskar enters the film as a participant...

...The secondary characters, so necessary to the landscape of a picaresque tale, are virtually reduced to bit parts...

...She is romanced by a young Pole, Jan Bronski (Daniel Olbrychski), and a young German, Alfred Matzerath (Mario Adorf), her future husband and the presumed father of Oskar...

...He also faithfully expresses Grass' conceit of an omniscient and ridiculously precocious first-person narrator...

...For example, in the novel Oskar learns of Agnes' assignation with Bronski—never explicitly described by Grass—through precocious inference...

...Greff s wife Lina, who takes on all comers, from Oskar to the invading Russians—these people and many others pop in and out of the adaptation without the rhyme or reason of the original...

...Igor Luther's cinematography is the film equivalent of what is called "magic realism" in painting—an eerie, almost hyper-realistic form that paradoxically fits the fantastic content of Grass' epic...

...As we follow the camera out of the womb, Oskar (David Bennent) describes his own somewhat reluctant entry into the world...

...Yet all the while we and Oskar can also see Matzerath, reflected in the mirror on the closet doors, sitting in the dining room...

...Finally, we meet the narrator himself, sitting inside his mother's womb, waiting to be born and looking like a skeptical young Oskar Werner with Dumbo ears...

...o f course, some compression is necessary for any film adaptation of a piece of literature, but too much of the book's breadth is lost in Schlon-dorffs treatment...

...In these introductory scenes, Schlondorff effectively conveys the historical and political context of the story, along with a hint of the grotesque comedy that is to follow...

...But here Schlondorff starts to run into problems with the film's point of view...

...Although Oskar stubbornly continues to resist growing up, history marches steadily onward and the rise of Nazism threatens the free city of Danzig...

...In Oskar's case, refusing to grow up is equivalent to "just following orders...

...1 must answer in the negative, and 1 hope that you too . . . will regard me as nothing more than an eccentric who, for private and what is more esthetic reasons . . . drummed up a bit of protest on an instrument that was a mere toy...

...And The Tin Drum is unquestionably a technical success...

...Incongruous moments of sentimentality creep into the film, too...

...But the book more tellingly, and logically, opens and closes with Oskar in a mental asylum...

...Michael Kohlhaas (1968), based on Heinrich von Kleist's story, was a costume drama of sweeping scale and plodding execution...

...Sometimes Winkler and her fellow performers are at the mercy of Schlon-dorff's illogical staging...

...he asks in the book...

...In the film, the audience watches the lovers frenetically copulating in bed, something Oskar could not have witnessed because he, unlike the all-seeing camera, was not there...

...And Maur-ic Jarre adds some appropriately jarring notes to match the discord of the times...

...Coup de Grace (1976), based on Marguerite Yourcenar's novel about postrevolution-ary Russia, was an unhappy marriage of Gallic modernism and Teutonic postmodernism...

...Meyn, the musician who learns to play his trumpet for the Nazis...

...Nicos Perakis' production design captures the precarious and ironically claustrophobic freedom of Danzig between the wars and the heady, illusory openness of the Baltic...

...During this period the cinema has shown us the rise and fall of Nazism from practically every perspective but that of a child...

...In one scene, a quarrel between Agnes and her husband drives Oskar out of the dining room into an adjoining bedroom, where he hides in the closet while the couple carry on in front of their dinner guest, Bronski...

...Agnes, Matzerath, Bronski, and Oskar had been walking along the seashore when a fisherman reeled in his catch: scores of eels, squirming in and around the bait —a severed horse's head—on the end of the line...

...Eventually, the Polish Corridor is overrun first by Germany and then, as the War nears an end, by the Soviet Union...

...Yet the director thereby obscures the novelist's subtle point about the difficulty of keeping guilty secrets from children, as well as the novel's coherent and consistent perspective...

...But this scene occurs in the movie without the ironic context in the novel that reveals his action to be less commendable than merely childish: "Does that make me...

...Matzerath insists on buying some of the eels for dinner, and it is his attempt to force Agnes to eat them that precipitates their argument...

...Why doesn't he notice what is going on not a dozen feet from where he sits...

...Soon afterward, Agnes rushes into the bedroom and flops onto the bed sobbing, followed by Bronski, who has been sent by Matzerath to comfort her...

...As for the acting, Winkler's superb performance is matched by the rest of the cast, particularly young Bennent, Germany's answer to Justin Henry, who is close to perfect...

...As he tells his fantastic tale, it is acted out in comic detail: While two Prussian soldiers search for a political activist on the run, Oskar's grandmother-to-be calmly squats in a potato field, hiding the fugitive beneath her billowing peasant skirts...

...A Free Woman (1972) was a contemporary soap opera that resembled a made-for-public-television movie advertising its good intentions with documentary-like earnestness...

...Now and then she squirms, and we understand why after the soldiers leave, when Oskar's grandfather-to-be emerges from his hiding place, buttoning his fly-Later, we see Agnes first as a girl and then as a young woman in the " free city" of Danzig, in the post-World War 1 "Polish Corridor...

...in the movie, even though he has been introduced as the voice-over narrator, Oskar's presence as simply one of the characters makes less credible his knowledge of events that occur when he is off screen...

...Playing ac-cordians and horns, with Oskar banging away on his tin drum, the troupe-stages an impromptu concert atop a concrete bunker, and the harsh juxtaposition of military fortifications and fantasy figures etched against the clear blue Channel sky is an image worthy of that master of magic realism on celluloid, Fellini...

...In the movie, the entire horse's-head episode seems like a gratuitous grotesquery, an arbitrary incitement...

...Oskar, hiding under the rostrum at a Nazi rally, disrupts the preceedings by merrily pounding away on his drum...

...The Academy Award-winning film version of the acclaimed epic novel does begin promisingly...

...Bernd Lepel's sets are properly stuffy and overstuffed bourgeois shrines...

...On his third birthday Oskar decides to remain a child, at least in size...

...This scene is doubly confusing because the reason for the quarrel is never very clear in the film...

...This enabled him to begin and end the movie with two strikingly parallel scenes: the opening shot of Oskar's grandmother squatting in the potato field and a closing shot of her in the same spot, watching Oskar depart on a refugee train at War's end...

...Schlondorff fully appreciates Grass' genius in seizing on that dimension to demonstrate how the "innocent" abdication of responsibility can have tragic consequences...

...Now Schlondorff has made an impressive but ultimately unsatisfying adaptation of The Tin Drum in collaboration with its author, Gunter Grass...

...Greff, the scoutmaster-turned-Hitler Youth leader, whose affection for young boys is more than slightly suspicious...

...Still, the film is true to the emotional impact of the novel, even though it appears 25 years after the book was first published and 35 years after the end of World War II...

...a Resistance Fighter...

...So far, so good...