The Tin Drum (DVD & Blu-Ray) ( Die Blechtrommel ) ( Le tambour )

The Tin Drum (Blu-Ray) (*)

Out of Stock

Original Title: Die Blechtrommel
Alternate Title: Le tambour
Screened, competed or awarded at:
Cannes Film Festival
Oscar Academy Awards
Other Film Festival Awards

Language Selections:
English ( Subtitles )
German ( Dolby Digital 5.1 )
German ( Dolby DTS-HD Master Audio )

Product Origin/Format:
United Kingdom ( Blu-Ray/Region B )

Running Time:
163 min

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen (1.66:1)

Special Features:
Cast/Crew Interview(s)
Commentary
Interactive Menu
Making Of
Posters
Scene Access
Trailer(s)
Uncut
Booklet
Remastered
Blu-Ray & DVD Combo

Movie filmed in 1979 and produced in:
France ( France, Benelux )
Germany ( Germany, Central Europe )
Poland ( Russia, Eastern Europe )
Yugoslavia ( Russia, Eastern Europe )

Directed By:
Volker Schlöndorff

Written By:
Jean-Claude Carrière
Günter Grass

Actors:
Mario Adorf ..... Alfred Matzerath
Angela Winkler ..... Agnes Matzerath
David Bennent ..... Oskar Matzerath
Katharina Thalbach ..... Maria Matzerath
Daniel Olbrychski ..... Jan Bronski
Tina Engel ..... Anna Koljaiczek (jung)
Berta Drews ..... Anna Koljaiczek
Roland Teubner ..... Joseph Koljaiczek
Tadeusz Kunikowski ..... Onkel Vinzenz
Andréa Ferréol ..... Lina Greff (as Andréa Ferreol)
Heinz Bennent ..... Greff
Ilse Pagé ..... Gretchen Scheffler
Werner Rehm ..... Scheffler
Käte Jaenicke ..... Mutter Truczinski
Helmut Brasch ..... Der Alte Heilandt (as Helmuth Brasch)

Synopsis:

In Volker Schlöndorff's award-winning adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass' allegorical novel, David Bennent plays Oskar, the young son of a German rural family, circa 1925. On his third birthday, Oskar receives a shiny new tin drum. At this point, rather than mature into one of the miserable specimens of grown-up humanity that he sees around him, he vows never to get any older or any bigger. Whenever the world around him becomes too much to bear, the boy begins to hammer on his drum; should anyone try to take the toy away from him, he emits an ear-piercing scream that literally shatters glass. As Germany goes to hell during the 1930s and '40s, the never-aging Oskar continues savagely beating his drum, serving as the angry conscience of a world gone mad. The intense and visceral Tin Drum was one of the most financially successful German films of the 1970s and won the 1979 Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the 1979 Golden Palm (which it shared with Apocalypse Now). In the late '90s, the film became the center of a censorship controversy when some U.S. videotapes were confiscated because of the film's supposed violation of a child pornography statute.

Winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or and the Best Foreign Film Oscar, and adapted from one of the major works of postwar German literature (whose author later won the Nobel Prize), few films have such a powerhouse artistic pedigree. When Oskar Matzerath (the extraordinary David Bennent, just twelve at the time) receives a tin drum for his third birthday, he vows to stop growing there and then - and woe betide anyone who tries to take his beloved drum away from him, as he has a banshee shriek that can shatter glass. As a result, he retains a permanent child's-eye perspective on the rise of Nazism as experienced through petit-bourgeois life in his native Danzig, the 'free city' claimed by both Germany and Poland whose invasion in 1939 helped kick-start World War II. With the help of Luis Buñuel's favourite screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, director Volker Schlöndorff turns Günter Grass's magical-realist masterpiece into a carnivalesque frenzy of bizarre, grotesque yet unnervingly compelling images as Oskar turns his increasingly jaded eye and caustic tongue on the insane follies of the adult world that he refuses to join.
Arrow Academy presents Volker Schlöndorff's masterpiece in its original theatrical version and the Director's Cut, seen for the first time in the UK after its Cannes Film Festival premiere.

Danzig in the 1920s/1930s. Oskar Matzerath, son of a local dealer, is a most unusual boy. Equipped with full intellect right from his birth he decides at his third birthday not to grow up as he sees the crazy world around him at the eve of World War II. So he refuses the society and his tin drum symbolizes his protest against the middle-class mentality of his family and neighborhood, which stand for all passive people in Nazi Germany at that time. However, (almost) nobody listens to him, so the catastrophe goes on...

This product was added to our catalog on Wednesday 18 July, 2012.