All comes together at the end. Landmarks are saved, hearts are mended, long-deferred love is realized, coincidences are explained, the past is healed, the future is assured, the movie is over. I liked the last part the best.
The Tin Drum
(Directed by Volker Schlondorff; starring David Bennent, Mario Adorf; 1979)
Allegories have trouble standing for something else if they are too convincing as themselves. That is the difficulty with The Tin Drum, which is either (a) an allegory about one person’s protest against the inhumanity of the world, or (b) the story of an obnoxious little boy.
The movie invites us to see the world through the eyes of little Oskar, who on his third birthday refuses to do any more growing up because the world is such a cruel place. My problem is that I kept seeing Oskar not as a symbol of courage but as an unsavory brat; the film’s foreground obscured its larger meaning.
So what does that make me? An anti-intellectual philistine? I hope not. But if it does, that’s better than caving in to the tumult of publicity and praise for The Tin Drum, which has shared the Grand Prix at Cannes (with Apocalypse Now) and won the Academy Award as Best Foreign Film, and is hailed on all fronts for its brave stand against war and nationalism and in favor of the innocence of childhood.
Actually, I don’t think little Oskar is at all innocent in this film; a malevolence seems to burn from his eyes, and he’s compromised in his rejection of the world’s evil by his own behavior as the most spiteful, egocentric, cold, and calculating character in the film (all right: except for Adolf Hitler).
The film has been adapted by the West German filmmaker Volker Schlondorff from the 1959 novel by Günter Grass, who helped with the screenplay. It chronicles the career of little Oskar, who narrates his own life story starting with his mother’s conception in a potato patch. Oskar is born into a world divided: In the years after World War I, both Germans and Poles live in the state of Danzig, where they get along about as well as Catholics and Protestants in Belfast.
Oskar has fathers of both nationalities (for reasons too complicated to explain here), and he is not amused by the nationalistic chauvinism he sees around him. So, on his third birthday, he reaches a conscious decision to stop growing. He provides a plausible explanation for his decision by falling down the basement stairs. And for the rest of the movie he remains arrested in growth: a solemn-faced, beady-eyed little tyke who never goes anywhere without a tin drum that he beats on incessantly. For his other trick, he can scream so loudly that he shatters glass.
There is a scene in which Oskar’s drum so confuses a Nazi marching band that it switches from a Nazi hymn to “The Blue Danube.” The crashing obviousness of this scene aside, I must confess that the symbolism of the drum failed to involve me.
And here we are at the central problem of the movie: Should I, as a member of the audience, decide to take the drum as, say, a child’s toy protest against the marching cadences of the German armies? Or should I allow myself to be annoyed by the child’s obnoxious habit of banging on it whenever something’s not to his liking? Even if I buy the wretched Drum as a Moral Symbol, I’m still stuck with the kid as a pious little bastard.
But what about the other people in the movie? Oskar is right at the middle of the tug-of-war over Danzig and, by implication, over Europe. People are choosing up sides between the Poles and the Nazis. Meanwhile, all around him, adult duplicity is a way of life. Oskar’s mother, for example, sneaks away on Thursday afternoons for an illicit sexual interlude. Oskar interrupts her dalliance with a scream that supplies work for half the glassmakers in Danzig. Does this make him a socialist or an Oedipus?
Soon after, he finds himself on the road with a troupe of performing midgets. He shatters glasses on cue, marches around in uniform, and listens as the troupe’s leader explains that little people have to stay in the spotlight or big people will run the show. This idea is the last Oskar needs to have implanted in his mind.
The movie juxtaposes Oskar’s one-man protest with the horror of World War II. But I am not sure what the juxtaposition means. Did I miss everything? I’ve obviously taken the story on a literal level, but I don’t think that means I misread the film as it stands.
If we come in armed with the Grass novel and a sheaf of reviews, it’s maybe just possible to discipline ourselves to view The Tin Drum as a solemn allegorical statement. But if we take the chance of just watching what’s on the screen, Schlondorff never makes the connection. We’re stuck with this cretinous little kid, just when Europe has enough troubles of its own.
T.N.T. Jackson
(Directed by Cirio H. Santiago; starring Jeanne Bell; 1975)
You remember the story about John Carter of Mars. He was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s hero, and he galloped all over Mars on whatever passed for a horse up there. One day he was attacked and chased by a band of villains who started hacking at him with their swords.
Carter of Mars drew his own trusty blade and started hacking back at them, while trying to make it up the castle stairs. But they were too much for him. First he lost a leg. Then an arm. They were gaining on him. “The hell with this,” said John Carter, throwing away his sword, drawing his atomic ray gun and zapping the bad guys into a radioactive ash heap.
I think about that story every time I see a Kung Fu movie, because Kung Fu movies depend on the same unwritten rules as John Carter novels: Nobody can have a gun. If they had a gun, they’d just shoot you, and you wouldn’t get to go through the whole “aaaaaiiiiieeeee” number and leap about with your fists flashing, your foot cocked, and your elbow of death savagely bent. It’s great to have a black belt, but it’s better if the bad guys know the rules.
They do in T.N.T. Jackson, which is easily the worst movie I’ve seen this year (yes, worse, far worse, than Rape Squad). And so we get all the obligatory postures, all the menacing glares, and especially all the slow-motion leaps through the air. At the end, so great is the heroine’s wrath that she propels her fingers of vengeance all the way through the villain, who looks mighty surprised at that, let me tell you.
One of the little problems with T.N.T. Jackson, alas, is that the Kung Fu fight scenes have been so loosely staged you can easily see the fighters aren’t even touching each other. This results in some curious moments, as when the heroine thrusts her foot at a bad guy, who recoils violently, though he wasn’t even touched. Maybe what she needs is some Dr. Scholl’s deodorant powder?
The movie’s about a drug-smuggling ring in Asia. T.N.T. Jackson (played by Jeanne Bell) is teamed up with one of the smugglers (Stan Shaw) and is also searching for the killer of her brother. That’s not just the plot summary, it’s the plot. There are innumerable badly staged fights, a confrontation with a U.S. government agent (Pat Anderson in U.S. government-issue bikinis), lots of idle threats, and the quaint notion that T.N.T. Jackson fights better when nude and in the dark.
This leads to a scene in which, after her clothes have been ripped off, she gets into a fierce battle for control of the light switch. She turns off the lights and demolishes three bad guys. The villain turns the lights back on. She turns them off. He turns them on, etc. I began mentally composing a screenplay for Young Tom Edison Meets the Savage Sisters.
Turbulence
(Directed by Robert Butler; starring Ray Liotta, Catherine Hicks; 1997)
Turbulence thrashes about like a formula action picture that has stepped on a live wire: It’s dead, but doesn’t stop moving. It looks like it cost a lot of money, but none of that money went into quality. It’s schlock, hurled at the screen in expensive gobs.