The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel, 1979) is Volker Schlöndorff's historical drama, adapted from Günter Grass, and you can watch it online on iFILM. In the Free City of Danzig, a boy named Oskar Matzerath looks at the adult world and decides, at age three, never to grow up.

Oskar throws himself down the cellar stairs and simply stops growing. His body stays a child's; his mind sharpens. Armed with a tin drum and a scream that shatters glass, he moves through the rise of Nazism, invasion, and war. Around him swirl his tangled Polish-German-Kashubian family, buried secrets about who fathered whom, shopkeepers and soldiers. Oskar sees everything, forgets nothing, and refuses to join a world losing its mind.

Twelve-year-old David Bennent plays Oskar — one of the strangest, most haunting child performances ever filmed. Schlöndorff turns Grass's grotesque novel into something physical, blackly funny, and at moments genuinely unsettling, a fable about how ordinary people fall for fascism. In 1979 it shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes with Apocalypse Now and went on to take the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Stream The Tin Drum (1979) online on iFILM.