(Die Blechtrommel). The rise of Nazism as seen through the diabolically knowing eyes of a young child: the key to any adaptation of Günter Grass's novel lies in the child himself, which is to say, one can't imagine Schlöndorff's film without young David Bennent as Oskar. In choosing to remain a child, but with none of Peter Pan's innocence or whimsy, Oskar locates the politics of brutality in adult behavior. And he finds lesser examples of the larger treachery everywhere he turns; in the doomed setting of pre-War Danzig, Oskar experiences his mother's simultaneous marriage to a German and love affair with a Pole as a kind of Occupation. With the piercing, plaintive scream that he uses as a weapon, he affects the demise of all that he cannot understand-or understands all too well. Bennent, twelve years old at the time of the film's making, renders Oskar as the irony that Günter Grass created: not an omniscient narrator but an omniscient protagonist. "The whole world is watching," in the form of a little boy.