Selected scenes from the massive Gunther Grass novel about a tiny-tot social protester in Hitler's Germany who, by force of will, stops growing on his third birthday. The bare storyline, shorn of the Gunther Grass prose, advances a rather sentimental Peter Pannish notion of the moral superiority, and every other kind of superiority, of children. Had Volker Schlondorff wanted to contribute something original to his adaptation of the novel, he might have considered taking a more scolding tone toward the little hero, suggesting that perhaps what Nazi Germany needed was not a greater amount of infantilism and opting-out. With Angela Winkler, Mario Adorf. (1979) — Duncan Shepherd
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