User Reviews

Dr. Josef Mengele, one of the most wanted of Nazi war criminals has been a very busy man. What started as an experiment back in 1943 when Adolph Hitler let Mengele take some blood and skin samples is about to come to fruition.

Gregory Peck whose screen image runs more along the line of Atticus Finch is a truly frightening and malevolent Mengele. Hidden away in his Brazilian jungle hideout, Peck has made remarkable progress in cloning, something we are only grappling with now.

Without the serious moral questions that would trouble most people, Peck successfully cloned 94 bouncing baby Hitlers and has deposited them among selected families of proper Aryan background. Of course part of the experiment is that the fathers have to die when the children are 14 as Hitler's father did.

Steven Guttenberg who gets himself killed doing a little amateur Nazi hunting, before he dies manages to tell what he knows to a man who makes it his life vocation bringing Third Reich criminals to justice. That would be Laurence Olivier as Ezra Lieberman(Simon Wiesenthal). It's a race against time before the evil scheme is either carried out or thwarted.

The Boys from Brazil is a great suspense thriller which asks some very sticky moral questions. Laurence Olivier got his last Academy Award nomination for his role, yet another dusting off of his patented mittel Europa accent. Yet I really do believe it is Peck's film. He shows what he can do as a villain and successfully breaks all bonds of his stereotyping.

If you could kill a baby or an adolescent Hitler, would you?

Like its sister film MARATHON MAN, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL is a sinister and realistic thriller that looks at the question of surviving Nazis hiding out in South America. Did they survive and did some of them continue their sinister human experiments that were started in the concentration camps? While I think MARATHON MAN has the edge in terms of being an enjoyable, all-time classic, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL is still a very good, taut thriller that just happens to have an excellent ensemble cast to boot.

Two old-time heavyweights are pitted against each other here: a virtually unrecognisable Gregory Peck as sinister Nazi scientist Dr Josef Mengele, and Laurence Olivier as the doddery old Jew hot on his tail. The two men don't meet until their climatic showdown, but what a treat it is when they do! Throughout the film, both actors remind us why they were considered worldwide stars. Peck is utterly repulsive as the ruthless Nazi, but Olivier steals the film as the sympathetic Nazi hunter in a reversal of the role he played in MARATHON MAN.

The film is slow paced, but remains engaging throughout, and the suspense never ceases. There's globetrotting action, assassins and a scary storyline including cloning as well as Jeremy Black playing an extremely creepy child. This is an unashamedly old-fashioned film that doesn't rely on fight scenes or car chases to tell the story, and here intelligent scripting and fine cinematography win out over the usual humdrum staples. The supporting cast is remarkable: James Mason as a Nazi, Denholm Elliott as a shifty bureaucrat, Steve Guttenberg surprisingly good in one of his earliest roles as a tragic investigator, along with the likes of Walter Gotell, Michael Gough, Wolfgang Preiss and even a couple of British actresses in brief roles: Prunella Scales and Linda Hayden. The last twenty minutes or so are absolutely riveting as the story comes to a head, and it finishes in an extremely satisfying way too. As chilling a film as any horror, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL is a fine example of the thriller genre at its best.

"The Boys from Brazil" is admittedly an improbable movie, but chilling nonetheless. American college student Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg) finds Nazi doctor Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) hiding out in South America. Kohler tries to report Mengele's diabolical plans (for a Fourth Reich) to Nazi hunter Ezra Liebermann (Laurence Olivier*), but Mengele murders him. The rest of the movie shows Liebermann investigating the mysterious deaths of several men around the world, all of whom had sons who look exactly the same. The climax comes when Liebermann and Mengele finally meet.

As is apparently always the case with Ira Levin's stories ("Rosemary's Baby" and "The Stepford Wives"), everything seems to be normal at first, until some point where you realize that there is clearly something unseemly going on. It may be an outlandish concept, but the whole movie is quite intense once you realize what Mengele and his cronies are planning.

*Interestingly, Laurence Olivier had played a Nazi in "Marathon Man" two years earlier.

With the most German of movie musical scores (by Jerry Goldsmith) since "Judgement at Nuremberg", the most vile political group of all time is said to be still thriving way down in South America where a nefarious plan is underway. One of the most villainous of all Nazis is in charge, and an all-time Hollywood hero takes on his only evil role to play it. He is joined by one of the all-time classic British actors who just two years before had received an Oscar Nomination for playing another Nazi, so to see him on the opposite side of the spectrum is quite a testimony to Sir Laurence Olivier's career.

The evil here comes in the form of Gregory Peck. Yes, Audrey Hepburn's protector in "Roman Holiday" and the heroic attorney of "To Kill a Mockingbird" takes on the role of Dr. Joseph Mengele who at the time of the release of this movie was actually rumored to be living in Brazil. Novelist Ira Levin used Mengele as the doctor based upon his actual experiments during World War II on concentration camp inmates who were apparently too weak to work or were deemed appropriate for misguided medical research. That element of Mengele's real life is utilized here, particularly evidenced on the poor little Brazilian boy whose radio happens to pick up a meeting between Mengele and his constituants over the plan to return the Nazi party to its former Satanic glory.

Olivier plays Ezra Lieberman, a fictional character based upon Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter whose investigation helped lead to the arrest of the notorious Adolf Eichmann. Through Jewish college student Steve Guttenberg, Lieberman learns of Mengele's presence in Brazil and further investigation leads him to Brazil for a confrontation with his life-long enemy. The confrontation is violent and bloody, but brings on a moral dilemma for the revelation that part of Mengele's plot has succeeded and that an element of Hitler's evil still resides out there in all parts of the world.

Fascinating acting between Olivier and Peck (who share only one lengthy scene) and the tense atmosphere leads to a sinister battle between good and evil. James Mason has a smaller role as one of Peck's co-horts, but is basically wasted. Among the character cameos are by Lilli Palmer, Uta Hagen, Denholm Elliott, Rosemary Harris and Ann Meara. As for Peck's villainy, he is not only genuinely evil as a human being, but deliciously mean, especially when he brutally attacts an underling who was supposed to be elsewhere then tells the man's rather over made-up wife yelling for a doctor, "I am a doctor, you idiot", then adds "Shut up, you ugly bitch!" when she orders him away. Having just played MacArthur, Peck's turnabout is rather shocking, and he takes every opportunity to chew the scenery without choking on it.

This is the type of movie that might make an anti-Semite re-think their feeling towards the Jewish race and while obviously fantastic in a Science Fiction way, it also shows the danger of experimental science, particularly cloning. Political explanations of how good this could be for the world are reminiscent of Donald Sutherland's speech in "JFK" of how governments have been doing these sort of things since the days of Julius Caesar. This remains up there with political dramas such as "The Manchurian Candidate" and "All the President's Men" that will keep the eyes of the keen viewer upon the government to make sure that they are doing what they were elected to do-serve the people, not the needs of the 1% or nefarious political ambitions. In an ironic twist of fate, the real Joseph Mengele died a year later while swimming in Brazil, sort of a slice of ice cream to go on the cake of the destruction of that evil political group that almost destroyed the world 35 years before.

When "The Boys From Brazil" was released in 1978, the concept of cloning was more science fiction than reality. Now, almost 25 years later, the possibility of human cloning is here.

The fictional story involves real life German WWII "Angel of Death", Dr. Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) having cloned 94 baby boys from the cells of you know who and placed them around the world in environments that closely approximate the real life conditions in which the donor was raised, in the hope of reproducing an exact duplicate. Student Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg in an excellent early performance) discovers the plot and tries to alert famed Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier). After Kohler is murdered, Weisenthal begins to take the warnings seriously. He too discovers the plot and frightens the Nazi commanders in South America (including James Mason) enough to have Mengele's project canceled. Mengele tries to carry on alone before the inevitable showdown with Lieberman.

Gregory Peck, cast against type, gives a chilling performance as Mengele. Olivier, complete with Jewish accent and looking thin and frail as the Nazi hunter (allegedly based on Simon Weisenthal), gives an excellent performance as well. Mason is given little to do as Mengele's Chief of Security. Young Jeremy Black plays the various clones convincingly right down to the accents. Others in the cast include Lili Palmer as Lieberman's sister, Uta Hagan as Frieda the prisoner who provides Lieberman with vital information, Anne Meara and Rosemary Harris as two of the mothers and Denholm Elliot and John Dehner in other roles.

It's really frightening to realize that the concept of cloning presented in this story could now become a reality.

An exciting plot, a workmanlike script, and good performances from Peck and Olivier help overcome the complete implausibility of the premise. It's fun seeing what may be Steve Guttenberg's best performance. And Lilli Palmer was still gorgeous, even in her 60s.

The worst thing about watching it for the first time is knowing beforehand what the film's big, shocking revelation is (in fact, summaries of the film's plot tend to give it away, apparently not realizing that it's supposed to be an epiphany). I would really like to have seen it without knowing in advance just what Ezra Lieberman was going to figure out about the mysterious deaths of those harmless old men.

Those who have looked into Mengele's postwar career will be amused at Peck's makeup. In an effort at accuracy, it is based on a picture which was widely circulated for years in the belief that it showed a middle-aged Mengele. In fact, the man in the photo was just some poor South American shlub who had the misfortune to be snapped by an overenthusiastic photographer. We now know that Mengele himself was much less impressive in his later years, with his sagging jowls, gray hair and walrus mustache. In fact, photos show him as rather friendly-looking and avuncular--except for his eyes, which are stone cold.

This film, of course, has nothing to do with the real Mengele's postwar life. Mengele was not a commanding, white-suited figure, living the high life in expensive hotels, attending parties with sycophantic underlings, and continuing his hellish experiments in a jungle laboratory. He lived out his days as a sad, pathetic weasel of a man whom nobody liked. That's a better fate for Mengele...but it wouldn't make such a good movie.

"The Boys from Brazil" is a brilliant film but it is also a horrible reminder of the evil that exists in this world.

There are superb performances from the leading cast - Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier most obviously - and the story, while farfetched, is not impossible, indeed, modern genetic science makes it perfectly reasonable. Possibly the most inexplicable element of the enterprise is "How did anyone get the stellar cast to take part in such a film ?" Today's image conscious and pampered generation of stars certainly wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.

The simple answer is that, not that many years ago, actors actually 'acted' ! They took on roles which may not have been politically correct but they then did what they were paid for and - hey - they produced magic. They delivered performances, often with a message as in "The Boys form Brazil", which transcended any objections to the film content.

As Mengele, Peck exudes every ounce of menace that the role calls for; as Lieberman, presumably intended as a thinly disguised version of Simon Wiesenthal, Olivier did what he always did and inhabits the role. These two dominate the film in a way that few have ever done.

The horrific premise, that clones of Adolf Hitler had been implanted in various places around the world, is an astonishing notion and yet modern science makes it perfectly plausible. There are, of course, many questions, which the film attempts to answer, regarding the upbringing of the children, particularly their environmental backgrounds and how this might affect their development. This is not a simple problem but it is an intriguing one; undisturbed, where might it have led ?

If the film has a weakness, it is in the eventual confrontation between Mengele and Lieberman which is almost laughable, two old men having a 'punch up'. However, the ultimate actions of the Hitler clone, and the final scene, foreshadow a potentially chilling future.

The film portrays Mengele as the monster that he was, his acolytes as either the insane fanatics or mind numbingly obedient servants that any NAZI official must have been. Lieberman is the rather less fanatical NAZI hunter, though portrayed as being a mainly harmless old man. Thank God that the good guys won because, if they hadn't, Lord knows what the outcome might have been.

Man, does Gregory Peck seem to be enjoying himself here. He was never good with accents but he forges ahead anyway, so "Bobby" comes out as "Buppy." He huffs and puffs. He blows houses down. He strangles a man among bowls of fruit and caviar on the buffet table, and afterwards tells the guy's wife, "Shut up -- you ugly bitch." He makes horrible faces with his jowls widened like a basilisk's. He revels in his villainy. And the best moment in the film is at the end, when he finally greets his nemesis, Lawrence Olivier playing a Nazi hunter, raises his pistol, and smiles, "Herr LEE-ber-man."

Olivier overplays as well although in a more subtle fashion, as befits Lord Olivier, ex-Hamlet, using time-honored techniques such as long pauses before and during significant utterances, and a tendency to look out of the side of his eyes without turning his head. He also projects a kind of wiliness that Peck doesn't show, a kind of ferret compared to his adversary's bulldozer.

Both of them evidently had a good time working together. During the hilarious climactic struggle in which the two aging men with tasty scarlet slashes on their cheeks roll over each other, grabbing for the obligatory gun, biting each other's ears, Olivier at one point during the shooting found himself on the bottom, being crushed by Peck, and looking up at Peck he pursed his lips and batted his eyelashes.

The plot is an effective thriller, so silly that even Ira Levin joked about it. But it makes a kind of nutty sense and carries you along. The kid who plays Hitler really IS obnoxious and I wouldn't mind seeing David Rubenstein knock him off. The location shooting is terrific and distracts one from the weaknesses of the plot. There is an enormous dam set in a mammoth mountain range. And it captures Lancaster, Pennsylvania, perfectly -- the early winter drizzle and chill, rolling hills of woodlots and farm land, the Grandma Moses farmhouses with their distinctive architecture and their barns. (That part of Pennsylvania really looks like what is called "a picture postcard.")

There actually was an organization of ex-Nazi comrades rather like the one described. And a lot of Nazis made it to safety in South America where they lived quietly in modest settings, not the white-suited baronial splendor of Peck's place. They kept busts of Hitler on the mantelpiece, hung Nazi flags on the walls, and even had a Miss Nazi contest. (I'm not making that up. It's from the staff of the Jewish Heritage Museum.)

The historical inaccuracies are unimportant to the plot but perhaps not to our understanding of human nature. The mind seems to have a tendency to operate in superlatives. It makes it easier to think about things if they can be divided up clearly into good and evil. Not just good and evil, but perfect good and perfect evil. Thus, Mengele was a dentist, as we know, but here he is given both an MD and a PhD -- "the perfect combination for a scientist." Mengele, instead of a monstrous and lowbrow sadist, is turned into the personification of evil. He doesn't even have a dog or a girlfriend. Mengele is useful to human thinking -- the mythological Mengele that is -- because he provides us with a perfect bad example, someone we can fully hate without guilt. If Mengele didn't exist we would have to invent someone like him.

(PS: he does not exist anymore.)

This film was certainly NOT the best thing made in the 70s, nor was it among Gregory Peck's finest moments, to say the least!! This was a very silly film that despite everything still managed to be very entertaining in a "turn off you brain and just enjoy it" way. The plot is dumb, I'll admit, but there's just something about this movie that is intriguing.

Peck plays Dr. Mengele and he's been a busy maniac all these years since the war. He apparently has cloned Hitler and placed all these potentially evil babies in foster families around the world. The plan is to have the babies' childhoods be as similar to the originals as possible, so when the boys reach a certain age, Mengele kills their fathers so that the boys lose their father at the same age Hitler did. Much of the film consists of watching Peck do this evil deed to various families.

Somewhere along the way, Laurence Olivier finds out about the Mengele plan from a young reporter. Olivier plays a Nazi hunter and at first he thinks the story is crap. But, once he realizes the plan is true, he springs to action.

In the end, Peck is visiting one of the little Hitlers when Olivier arrives for a final showdown. The way this is resolved--in particular, the way Adolf, Jr. reacts is priceless and the movie concludes.

I think that aside from the kooky plot, one of the big reasons I like the film because it looks like Peck and Olivier are having a contest to see which one is the greatest ham in film history! Peck wins it by a nose for his totally ridiculous German madman imitation--I just loved the silly makeup!

The Boys From Brazil was made in 1978, but it deals with human cloning. At the time, short sighted people dismissed it as ludicrous, but in light of recent cloning experiments the films has a topicality about it and probably seems marginally more plausible nowadays than it did when it was released.

So who are the boys from Brazil? They are young boys all bred from genetic skin grafts taken from the body of Adolf Hitler during the war years. In Paraguay, in the '70s, one of Hitler's most feared accomplices, Josef Menegele (Peck), has been toiling away in a jungle laboratory trying to breed young Hitler clones. A young reporter (Guttenberg) hits upon the plot, and is killed, but not before passing a message onto famed Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Olivier). As Lieberman investigates, he realises that something is going on and tracks down Mengele when he visits one of his creations in America.

There are some surprisingly violent moments, such as the savage dog sequence near the end, and a shocking murder at a dam in Sweden. The performances range from excellent (Olivier, Palmer, Mason) to stiff and unconvincing (Peck). The film is pretty interesting and thought provoking. I still don't totally buy the idea that Hitler could be cloned so perfectly that he would turn out like a power-hungry, racist, evil Nazi (surely it would be impossible to recreate all the life experiences that turned hium into the type of man he was). However, it poses some disturbing thoughts and is worth seeing provided you don't try to pick out the plot holes.

Quite a few reviewers seem to have disparaging comments about this movie. It may not be a cinematic masterpiece, but I personally found the plot quite gripping The idea if not totally plausible at least makes a compelling film.

The story, set in the 1970's, begins with a young Nazi hunter, Barry Kohler, who is tracking down a group of SS officers meeting in Paraguay. The aging veteran Nazi hunter, Ezra Lieberman (Kohler's hero), is first uninterested in his findings, but when Kohler turns up murdered, Lieberman uncovers a plot masterminded by the evil Nazi scientist, Dr. Mengele. These modern Nazis are attempting to set up a Fourth Reich by cloning their hero & Fueher, Adolf Hitler.

The actors make this movie, which might come off as a ridiculous tale with a less inspired cast. Lawrence Olivier is masterful as always in the role of the aging German Jew, Lieberman, whose character seems loosely based on Simon Weisenthal. However, Gregory Peck gives an absolutely chilling performance in an uncharacteristically villainous role for him, that of the notorious Holocaust 'doctor', Josef Mengele. Of course this story is purely fictional, with no resemblance whatsoever to Mengele's post war life. He was still alive in South America when this film was made and died a year or so later, unfortunately never brought to justice for his monstrous crimes.

Of course the tale takes on something of a different dimension in this era, when we actually have cloning of animals. The modern Nazis in this film take care not just to duplicate Hitler's DNA, but also endeavour to provide these cloned boys with a similar childhood environment to young Hitler's as well. The civil servant father would be murdered at a suitable time in order to elicit rage and hatred in the young clones. However, I agree with comments that Hitler's rise to power had more to do with conditions in Germany following its World War I defeat than to Hitler's disturbed master race, anti Semitic ideologies, whether genetic or environmentally induced. In other words, the impact of Adolf Hitler on Germany cannot be duplicated by cloning him and replicating his childhood environment.

Personally, I found the character similarities between all the young clones unbelievable, even given the identical genes & similar family environments. At least four of these boys are portrayed as arrogant, rude, and nasty and the last one, Bobby, positively cruel & heartless. However, the tear flowing down young Bobby's cheeks when he learns of his father's death is touching and reminds the viewer of his humanity. The Dobermans certainly make for a dramatic finale. However, I think a more effective closing scene might have been for Bobby to be shown perhaps mourning at his father's grave or interacting normally with his mother, not developing his sadistic photos. Also, at least one of the other clones might have been shown with some shred of decency. The villainy of every single one of these boys actually made the tale less credible for me. However, the entire premise of the film is intriguing (though disturbing) and makes for a suspenseful movie.

********** SPOILER ALERT************ I guess this movie would be heaps better if you don't actually know that it is about a Nazi plot to resurrect Hitler through the use of clones. If this is what you know about this film then you are likely to write it off as just another piece of Hollywood rubbish. However the film is far from that, and that fact that it has Lawrence Olivier and Gregory Peck as the lead actors should suggest that it is actually a lot more than that. Needless to say, both of those actors play their roles brilliantly, and when somebody suggested that if a lesser mortal than Gregory Peck were playing the villain then no doubt this movie would have fallen in a heap.

There are a few problems though, however the idea of cloning that is explored in this movie suggests that the original writer really knew his stuff. Basically what Megnele (Peck) is attempting to do is to create the same conditions of life that gave birth to Hitler, and this after producing a huge batch of cloned Hitler babies he places them in families around the world that matched the age of Hitler's parents. However, at a specific moment, Hitler's father died, so Mengele sends out a team of Nazi assassins to kill the adopted fathers of these children at the right time in hope to turn one of them into Adolf Hitler.

There is a problem though, and that is that while he may be able to control the family upbringing, he is not able to control the geopolitical events that led to the rise of Hitler. For instance, Hitler went into World War 1 as a corporal, was shot and wounded, and spent the rest of the war in hospital. Germany then went on to lose the war, suffered economic collapse, and revolution as a result, and was then humiliated by the victors. Even after that, the entire world economy collapsed at which point Hitler was able to rise to power.

Despite those factors, the film itself is still very, very well made, but then again, if you are reading this, then you have probably already seen the film, because I suggested that if you haven't seen this then you shouldn't read this commentary.