THERE WAS ONCE a drummer, his name was Oskar, and he stopped himself from growing on his third birthday. The world continued to grow around Oskar: the world, The War. But Oskar remained the size of a three-year-old, playing the role of a child, beating his tin drum, pounding for each passing syllable of history.

Oskar's history is the history of Germany during The War. Oskar lived in Danzig where he watched the Nazis come and go, the Jews live and die, the city stand and fall, his family shrink and grow. His story is about the destruction of Germany by a force that had proposed to make the Germans the mightiest race on Earth and how the Germans and the world learned to accept that destruction and drum on. Oskar is a little bit mad and Oskar's history is a little bit mad.

Gunter Grass filled his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), with symbols that are not symbols, with allegories that are not allegories, with messages that are not messages. Volker Scholondorff has turned this sprawling, self-conscious novel of post-war Germany into a beautiful and disturbing film that recreates Danzig of the '30s and '40s without adequately illuminating Grass' novel. His film is both a magnificent success--well-acted, unblinkingly photographed, crisply edited--and a huge failure, an adaptation that dismally dissipates the epic power of the novel.

"Barbaric, Mystical, bored," writes Grass of the 20th Century. Historians will one day recognize The Tin Drum as representative of a universal 20th Century experience, yet Grass' novel is above all a German work, addressing the provincial guilt and unease of post-war Germans, drawn to Hitler like adolescents to pornography and unable to cleanse themselves under the searchlight of vengeful, scrutinizing time.

Grass' novel is a perrennial best-seller in Germany, a volume of modern myths that has almost Biblical significance for those that lived through The War and knew Nazi Germany; and for the younger generation, for whom the swastika and the "heil" are the lost trapping of a confusing, all too-recent past. Even Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour nightmare, Our Hitler, with its pounding Wagner and Beethoven, acknowledges Oskar's drum. It beats in time to the modern German effort to recreate Hegel's sense of history, Goethe's sense of self, Nietzche's sense of strength and Gunter Grass' cheeky sense of post-modern myth--the eerie drumbeat of barbarism, mysticism, and boredom.

Little Oskar's story makes a fine scenario and Tin Drum is marvelously entertaining, even engrossing at times. Yet a question persists: why make this film? Must every literary classic stumble shell-shocked onto the screen? Time and a host of bad adaptations have shown that literature and cinema are not compatible cousins, that by their very nature, good novels will not make good films, just as the exciting visual effects of film cannot be duplicated in print.

Movie-making is big business, however, and The Tin Drum was guaranteed of commercial success in Germany because of the novel's popularity. Grass resisted all offers for the film rights to his book for 15 years until he decided he had met, finally, the right man to direct Oskar's story. Schlondorff (whose past films include Young Torless and The Lost Honor of Katherin Blum) asked sharp questions, Grass noted, and made no plans to significantly alter his book for the screen.

HERE IS The Tin Drum's failure, of course. Intimidated by Grass and by the novel itself, Schlondorff's film is hardly more than a moving picture show, Oskar's treasured photograph album (left out of the film) brought to life. The director has made little attempt to translate aspects of the novel into cinematic language. While Grass' imagination provides an exciting and titillating narrative, Scholondorff only steers his camera earnestly through each sequence, giving Oskar's war-time charades a warm, personal gloss. Schlondorff's Oskar is little Oskar, a cruel, manipulative Peter Pan who ultimately leaves his Never-never land. He is not Grass' Oskar: a mad, visionary historian vaging a wide, wild war on history.

Oh, Schlondorff must be conceded his nice touches. The film begins and ends with Oskar's grandmother in her Kashubian potato field, a Brechtian Mother Courage moving with time and walking in place, Mother Earth herself, born of the land and too old to travel far from her potato patch. She is an ugly, dirty (dirty-y) little woman who, quite by coincidence, spawns Oskar's mother, who in turn delivers Oskar.

Scholondorff is best at Oskar's birth, a womb-view of human re-entry. We stare with Oskar out of his mother's heaving port-hole, hurtle down the bloody, mucus-filled chute, and then, too soon, out the door into the glaring bulb-light of modern German, Western Middle-class civilization. "When little Oskar is three, he will have a toy drum," says Mama and his umbilical cord is cut.

Grass' Oskar speaks of himself in both the first and third person and Schlondorff tries admirably to integrate subjective and objective camera angles. His camera prowls, mimicking Oskar's roving, steely eyes, cutting neatly between the three-year-old perspective and the view of an omniscient, unobtrusive lens. But he fails to remain consistent, breaking now and then to leave Oskar's field of vision, sneaking in a shot that is too objective. A cleverer director might have found a way to convey images, like Oskar's mother's adultery with his Uncle Jan, without abandoning his point of view.

But even when he drops the subjective/objective technique, Schlondorff can be playfully brilliant. Following a sepia-toned clip of a Nazi rally comes a sequence in which Oskar's drumming turns the propaganda gathering into a waltzing Danube of Hitler Youth. As Oskar drums, the Nazi band picks up his waltz, a goose-stepping Nazi commandant adds a back-skip to his gait and a crowd of arms extended in "Seig Heils" begins to sway to the music. Aryan youths pair off to dance, leaving the SS confused and helpless.

However, Schlondorff fails to give a similar sense of irony to a Beckettian sequence with an eel fisherman on a stark beach. While Oskar keeps a cold, dark view on life, the film changes tone: now it is bleak and blue, now it is warm and red. Does Schlondorff misunderstand his little hero or has he simply made only token efforts at linking each sequence to the whole? He manages to reduce the most profound chapter of Grass' novel, a discussion about art and life between a midget magician and a soliderly artist to a frolicking picnic atop a cement pillbox.

AS OSKAR, Schlondorff discovered David Bennent, a ten-year-old, blue-eyed, frozen-faced lad who himself stopped growing at age six. Surrounded by a superb supporting cast, Bennent's Oskar watches the world with angry insolence, determined to drum, to examine the world of adults with studied innocence. His voice has a contemptible condescending tone that nonetheless seduces us. His high-pitched screams that break glass--art as a destructive protest--ring with the desperate tremor of a genius creating a master-piece. Bennent is terrifying in a Nazi uniform yet his cherubic smile is almost Christ-like in its beneficence. His Aryan forcefulness and unceasing intensity combine with a demonic sensuality that brings to mind images of a tiny Adolph Hitler.

Schlondorff feels he must play with Grass' symbols and he has included many of them: Oskar's red and white drums, the smashed glass, the eels, the death of Oskar's mother by over-consumption of fish, Oskar's valiant attempts at sex, cemetaries, the death-dealing Nazi-party pin. Yet unlike Grass' novel, Schlondorff's film refuses to tie these ugly images together; time has strange dimensions and the laudably meticulous attention to detail--violent and spectacular--leaves us empty. The Tin Drum is full of disturbing moments: Oskar is forced to drink a stone and urine soup; eels slither from the mouth of a slimy horse head; a hand pokes out of a coffin made of packing crates. These images fade in time, however, unlike the icy symbolism of Fassbinder's Marriage of Maria Braun, which treated modern German history with cinematic cynicism.

Maybe it is impossible to build a film on three adjectives: barbaric, mystical, bored. But if Schlondorff had kept those words in mind as he guided his camera over the russet rooftops of Old Danzig, he might have crafted a film that captured the anguish of the 20th Century as well as Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum.