Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #196: The Tin Drum (1979).

In this adaptation of Gunter Grass' celebrated 1959 novel, Oskar (David Bennent) is an unusual German boy on the sidelines of history. Born in 1924, at age three he suddenly stops physically growing and is given a tin drum for his birthday, from which he refuses to be parted. Around this time Oskar also discovers he has a scream which can shatter glass, employing it now whenever he's upset. Living with his single mother Agnes (Angela Winkler), who's unsure as to the identity of Oskar's father, until she dies with no explanation, Oskar now finds himself taking a rather picaresque journey around Germany under the newly-elected Third Reich, encountering such experiences as joyful as sex and music, and as horrible as war.

Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum won both the 1979 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or, and deservedly so. This is a sprawling, whimsical, graphic and strange but ultimately deeply powerful and measured examination of Nazi Germany and coming of age. Schlondorff's direction is admirably objective and lucid, bravely but discreetly withholding nothing in the sexual and violent scenes and cohesively weaving the magic realist elements into the rest of this tapestry, and his screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrire and Franz Seitz adequately reflects the era's mood and lingo. Bennent, in a challenging role for a child actor, makes Oskar a layered and charmingly mischievous but relatable young hero, but the best performance comes from Winkler, who turns what could've been simply a browbeaten single mother into a woman with clear backbone and dignity.

Some other pluses are Maurice Jarre's majestic score, the strikingly authentic period design, and the vibrant editing and cinematography. All in all, it's no wonder The Tin Drum was, well, a big hit.