Old Yorker

  • The Tin Drum

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Die Blechtrommel

    Volker Schlöndorff  (1979)

    The prologue to this screen adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum takes place in 1899, in rural Kashubia.  A peasant woman called Anna Bronski sits in a field that looks onto a bleak, nearly empty landscape.  She roasts on a makeshift fire a few of the potatoes she has dug from the earth.  An arsonist called Joseph Koljaiczek, on the run from the law, rushes towards Anna and begs her to hide him under her capacious skirts.  This unusual first meeting of the couple results in the birth of a baby girl, Agnes.  A year later, the police track Joseph down:  he’s sitting, with Anna and Agnes, in a different part of the same glum countryside.  Joseph once more evades capture – this time he plunges into a lake rather than under skirts – but he’s never seen or heard of again.  He may have drowned; family legend has it that he emigrated to America and made a fortune there.  These facts (or fictions) are recounted in voiceover by the film’s narrator.  This is Agnes’s son Oskar, born in 1924 in Danzig (present-day Gdańsk).  Oskar’s paternity is open to question:  Agnes has two lovers – a German grocer called Alfred Matzerath, whom she marries; and Jan Brodski, a Polish post office worker, who is also Agnes’s cousin.  At birth, Oskar has the mind and volition of an adult – he’s dubious about emerging from the womb at all.  Conversation in the room where Agnes is in labour tips the balance in favour of coming into the world:  clairaudient Oskar learns that, on his third birthday, he’ll receive the gift of a tin drum.  When the big day arrives, he gets the drum but also decides that enough is enough.  He doesn’t want to grow up.  Alfred has left the cellar door open and Oskar throws himself down a steep flight of steps.  No bones are broken but Oskar doesn’t grow another inch.  He also develops an instant, unshakeable attachment to the tin drum and the unusual talent of a scream so piercing that he can use it to shatter glass – and cause havoc – at will.  He make use of this talent whenever he’s angry or threatened.

    Grass’s novel, the first book of his ‘Danzig trilogy’, has been described as a surrealistic black comedy, and a political parable seen through a magic-realist lens.  The novel’s timeframe extends to the mid-1950s, by which time the narrator Oskar is a patient in a mental hospital.  The film, with a screenplay by Volker Schlöndorff, Jean-Claude Carrière and Franz Seitz, ends in 1945, at the point of the German surrender and its immediate aftermath.  At first, Oskar’s willed infantilism doesn’t seem an inevitable expression of his time and place.  His equivocation at the threshold of life could simply be the rational reaction of a precociously developed intelligence.  His uneasy fascination with the primal scene is remarkably vivid (from within a wardrobe, he watches his mother and Jan having intercourse; on another occasion, he assumes correctly they’re doing the same thing when he can’t actually see them) but not necessarily exceptional.  Oskar’s mentality isn’t immediately that of a budding Nazi or Nazi victim but his immature aspect and extraordinary characteristics connect increasingly with the historical and geographical setting.  Oskar’s father might be German or might be Polish, like Danzig itself.  The city, where Günter Grass was born in 1927, represented a kind of lebensraum blueprint and Volker Schlöndorff dramatises this powerfully.  Once the story reaches the late 1930s, Oskar’s propensity for breaking glass can’t fail to resonate with Kristallnacht.   In an early scene on the streets of Danzig, Oskar and other children at play march about chanting, ‘Burn the witch, black as pitch’.  A later scene, which takes place during World War II, describes a party at which Nazi officers, in their cups, are being entertained by the troupe of performing midgets which Oskar has joined.  The sequence ends with the whole company moving in a weirdly martial conga, singing the same children’s song.

    The Tin Drum, which shared the Cannes Palme d’Or with Apocalypse Now in 1979 and the following year became the first German picture to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, has two outstanding features.  They are David Bennent, who plays Oskar, and a persistent and distinctive physicality, expressed chiefly through the sights and sounds of people having food and sex, and the preparations for these.  Schlöndorff makes both forms of consumption intimidating and, in the case of the eating, horribly alive.  The film’s menu has a humble starter of charred potatoes but moves on to conger eels that reach shore in the severed head of a horse, and which are even more alarming when their own heads are removed before cooking and their bodies continue to wriggle.  Later on, there’s an aphrodisiac of sherbet powder mixed with spittle.  What lies beneath fabric is a strong motif too:  after that opening scene in which a man goes inside a woman’s skirts, we see Oskar, at his third birthday party, crawling under the tablecloth, where his mother and ‘Uncle’ Jan are playing footsie.  Schlöndorff and his cameraman Igor Luther do a fine job of following up this image, as gross adult legs career in close-up down the cellar stairs to reach the body of Oskar lying at the foot of them.

    The narrative works best in the movie’s first half, where it takes the form of a succession of startling, often funny vignettes.  Some of the sequences in the 1939-45 period are less satisfactory.  For the most part, they seem not as sharp as the earlier ones (at 142 minutes, The Tin Drum is slightly too long); a larger problem is the sex scenes involving Oskar.  (These caused considerable controversy at the time the film came out.)  After Agnes’s death, Alfred employs a girl called Maria to help out in the grocery and subsequently marries her.  Maria is seduced by Oskar and becomes his mistress.  In the story, Maria and Oskar are more or less the same age but this isn’t true of the people playing them:  Katharina Thalbach is twenty-five, while David Bennent is eleven.  It’s hard to see how Volker Schlöndorff could have avoided this difficulty, without suddenly compromising the prevailing physical frankness of the film.  But it is a difficulty.  The strong, emphatic playing of the main adult actors – Angela Winkler (Agnes), Mario Adorf (Alfred) and Daniel Olbrychski (Jan) – is well orchestrated. The cast also includes Charles Aznavour as a Jewish toymaker (Oskar needs his drum replacing every now and then).  Aznavour’s countryman Maurice Jarre supplies an imaginative and effective score.

    I saw the film on its original release, not again until now.  Although I reckon once every thirty-five years or so is often enough, The Tin Drum remains an impressive piece:  it’s important to remember how unusual it was, at the time it appeared, for a mainstream German movie to address the national pathology and traumas of the Nazi period.  It’s impossible to watch the film now without being reminded that in 2006 Günter Grass admitted to having been a teenage member of the Waffen-SS during World War II.  On a sillier level but still hard to ignore:  there are moments, while he has a pudding-basin haircut, when you think the large-eyed, pale-faced Oskar, if he had grown up, might have turned into Angela Merkel.

    31 August 2016

  • After the Solo (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Moira Armstrong (1975)

    [A bit daft to exhume this note but I wanted to because I remember After the Solo as a TV play which, at the age of nineteen, I especially enjoyed. (Broadcast by the BBC on 25 November 1975, it was, as far as I can see, never repeated.)  The trouble is, forty plus years on, I don’t remember too much else about it – and what I jotted down at the time is hard to decipher now.  The quotes below are the gist of the lines rather than verbatim.  Some of the plot details may be shaky too.]

    After the Solo by John Challen was a Play for Today about an unprepossessing, truculent schoolboy called Ralph Dawson.  He doesn’t get on well with his authoritarian father or quiet, distant mother.  He’s disliked by his classmates and by the staff at his boys-only secondary school.  Ralph’s one talent is his singing voice.  He belongs to a choral society and is chosen by its romantic, thoughtful choirmaster to sing a soprano solo in a performance of Fauré’s Requiem.  He falls out with one of his few friends and nastily hits him with a piece of slate.  Ralph is set upon and humiliated by a gang, as revenge for what he did to the other boy.  He’s frightened by the threat of further rough treatment from them, and that his voice will be damaged as a result.  Ralph receives, instead of weekly pocket money, monthly ‘merit’ money.  The amount is assessed by his father, according to the balance of Ralph’s good and bad deeds in the intervening weeks.  The cash is kept under lock and key but Ralph, in increasing need of danger money, manages to steal from it.  On the night of the performance, when the time for his solo arrives, Ralph at first can’t bring himself to begin but, once the lady mainstay of the choral society leaps in to substitute, he stands up and sings.  He is warmly applauded.  He returns home, knowing that the time has come for him to be rewarded for his singing efforts and for Mr Dawson to discover the theft.  Ralph faces his father but with one eye on the money box.

    This was the best single drama I’ve watched on television this year.  It was refreshing to see a Play for Today that didn’t push beyond the clear limits of its conception to try and make big points – which instead made its points so effectively that they seemed important ones.  The eccentric Welsh choirmaster Peters wasn’t a brilliant conception but Gerald James underplayed him well:  he made us listen to what Peters was saying behind his Celtic emotionality.  He stressed how poignant the solo would be if Ralph sang it.  The whole Fauré work, Peters said, was about transience; the ephemeral nature of a boy’s treble voice would be touchingly appropriate.  This was an essential theme of the play:  Ralph’s voice temporarily transcended his unattractive personality but that voice would soon disappear.  But the boy’s unattractiveness was paradoxically appealing too.  Reticent and with little awareness of other people, Ralph was also free of pretence and slyness – in contrast to his father or his teachers or the bitchy sopranos in the choir (their bitchiness was shown in an obvious and mechanical way: they were given a line apiece to convey it).

    Ralph’s father wasn’t sufficiently developed.  Leonard Rossiter – a clever and amusing actor but not, it seems, a very versatile one – smothered what character there was in the adenoidal fusspot that he created.  Although we could see flickers of pride and love for his son, Mr Dawson criticised Ralph relentlessly even when the latter was trying to be co-operative.  Of his new school blazer:

    Dawson:  Now you won’t grow out of it, will you?

    Ralph: No, I won’t.

    Dawson: No, I won’t, he says! Well, there’s nothing we can do about that – you will grow out of it!

    Mr Dawson knows that his son is there to be upbraided and disciplined without knowing why.  At home, he talks with a sickening, droning overconfidence.  He gloats in the little victories he wins over his strange, distant wife (Geraldine Newman) when they argue about Ralph.  At a PTA meeting, Mr Dawson is a haranguing, humourless pain in the neck – determined to keep talking and criticising his son, clinging leech-like to the headmaster (Barrie Cookson), who avoids Dawson with impatient, almost physical distaste. Leonard Rossiter – with that serpentine quality of speech and physical movement that is his speciality – was too theatrically big for Mr Dawson.  You were always conscious this was a performance, albeit an entertaining one.

    It’s a remark by the father that gives the play its title.  Agreeing to Ralph’s taking the solo, Mr Dawson tells the choirmaster:

    ‘Yes, he’s your responsibility for that.  Then after the solo, after the applause has ended, he’s my responsibility for good.’

    The remark was too neat a summing up (and the meaning of such parental responsibility wasn’t really explored).  Even so, the pivotal importance of Ralph’s solo guaranteed the play a strong and suspenseful climax.  Once he’d sung the solo, the boy would have to admit to his father that he’d stolen money from him; soon enough, his voice would break too and he’d have nothing going for him.  The writer John Challen intelligently restricted himself to pointing up the threats to Ralph of these specific changes, instead of trying to work up a vague loss-of-innocence-end-of-childhood theme.

    What made the play work was newcomer Nicholas Watson’s playing of Ralph.   With his heavy, bulldog face, sullen mien and unremarkable speaking voice, he looked primitive and sounded mechanical – both qualities were strongly expressive of the character.  The poignancy of Watson’s solo was extraordinary, for three reasons.  First, because the purity and clarity of his treble voice transcended Ralph’s dull appearance (this brought to mind R S Thomas’s poem A Blackbird Singing).  Second, because, like the choirmaster, one was aware that the sweet voice was transient (thickset Ralph already seemed to be a young man as much as a boy).  Third, because Ralph himself was unaware of these things – his thoughts were rather on the cash box.

    Moira Armstrong’s direction of the choir’s performance was effective in its restraint.  Elsewhere, the contrast between Ralph’s personality and singing was emphasised too obviously – images of the boy misbehaving were accompanied by the sound of his choir voice on the soundtrack.  I could have done without a shot of Ralph and his friend as small figures in an industrial landscape; this is such a tired device that, by now, it’s hardly a social comment at all, merely a realistic screen drama convention.  The play was much more effective in getting across its failure-to-communicate theme.  The actors often delivered their lines in a way that showed the words meant much more to the person speaking them than to anyone else in earshot.   In contrast, when Ralph sang his solo, what poured out seemed hardly to belong to him at all – it meant more to the adults in the audience than to the boy producing the sounds.  All in all, After the Solo was a strong and moving piece of work.

    [1975]

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