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THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL
Rating: 
UK. 1978.
Director – Franklin J. Schaffner, Screenplay – Heywood Gould, Based on the Novel by Ira Levin, Producers – Stanley O’Toole & Martin Richards, Photography – Henry Decae, Music – Jerry Goldsmith, Special Effects – Roy Whybrow, Makeup – Bill Lodge & Christopher Tucker, Production Design – Gil Parrando. Production Company – Producers Circle.
Cast:
Laurence Olivier (Ezra Liebermann), Gregory Peck (Dr Josef Mengele), James Mason (Colonel Eduard Siebert), Jeremy Black (Boys), Steve Guttenberg (Barry Kohler), Lilli Palmer (Esther Liebermann), John Rubinstein (David
Bennett), Bruno Ganz (Professor Bruchner), Uta Hagen (Frieda Maloney), Walter Gotell (Mundt), Wolfgang Preiss (Lofquist), Joachim Hansen (Fassler)
Plot: Aging Nazi hunter Ezra Liebermann receives a phone call from eager young admirer Barry Kohler. Kohler has bugged a conference held by the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in Paraguay wherein Mengele has assigned a group of Nazi assassins to kill 94 sixty-five year old civil servants all around the world over the next two-and-a-half years. The killings must appear as accidents – the future of the Third Reich claimedly hangs on the success of the mission. But Mengele tracks down and kills Barry before he can tell Liebermann everything. Liebermann starts investigating the deaths of all sixty-five year old men the world over. At first he finds nothing but then makes the remarkable discovery that some of the killed men all have identical adopted sons. As he investigates further the true extent of Mengele’s scheme becomes apparent – that Mengele has cloned 94 copies of Adolf Hitler and is now trying to recreate the events of the Fuhrer’s childhood, wherein Hitler’s civil servant father was killed at the age of 65, and in so doing replicate the Fuhrer’s psychological makeup.
There was a time in the 1960s and 70s when Nazis took over the stock racial villain roles once maintained by the Orientals in the 1920s and inherited by the Communists in the 50s and 60s. Nazis became well-established villains in A-list thrillers like The Quiller Memorandum (1967), The Night Porter (1974), Marathon Man (1976), Voyage of the Damned (1976), Bear Island (1979) and The Formula (1980), not to mention Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). But none though latched onto Nazis with such enthusiasm as low-budget horror films like She Demons (1958), The Flesh Eaters (1964), The Frozen Dead (1966), Flesh Feast (1970), Shock Waves (1975), Death Ship (1980), Night of the Zombies (1983) and the Z-movie classic They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1964), not to mention the really nasty Ilsa movies beginning with Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S. (1974). Indeed, as with Flesh Feast, They Saved Hitler’s Brain, this and The New Avengers episode The Eagle’s Nest (1976), there seemed an entire sub-genre of Hitler Survives films.
Ira Levin is in a class of his own but must have been aware if not parodying these movies when he wrote The Boys from Brazil (1976). Levin always has the ability to swing plots that in the recounting hinge between the audacious and the absurd – a woman coming to believe she is impregnated by The Devil (Rosemary’s Baby), a housewife coming to believe that the men in her town are replacing their wives with android duplicates (The Stepford Wives). Levin always manage to swing the inherent audacity of his plots with a series of scintillatingly clever turns – one can reach the end of an Ira Levin book and almost imagine Levin sitting with an irrepressible smile at his own smartness.
But, with the exception of Rosemary’s Baby, filmmakers have failed to duplicate Levin’s dazzling conceptual juggling game. The Boys from Brazil is a passable adaptation that at least conveys Levin’s story adequately. But part of the problem with The Boys from Brazil was that it was mounted as a 1970s A-budget thriller. It is thus unfortunately lumbered with an overacting star cast and a parade of luxurious international scenery. Director Franklin J. Schaffner had made the fine likes of Planet of the Apes (1968) and Patton (1970), but lacked the same touch here. The very size of the production tends to drown out the thriller elements, and here the tightness of Levin’s plot turns only become secondary to proceedings. And played out with such big-budget momentousness the insouciant lightness of Ira Levin’s writing cannot help but spill over into silliness. And rather silly it gets too, most notably in the acting – how Laurence Olivier, all patently theatrical quavering voice and prissy mannerisms, managed to earn an Academy Award nomination for his role in the film is a big mystery. Gregory Peck, in what was announced as his first villainous role, is quite the opposite extreme – his face is so stolid it appears to have been cast in wax. The implacability all has a certain effect but when he tries to go berserk, the effect is so odd it is laughable. A big disappointment.
Other Ira Levin film adaptations of genre note are Roman Polanski’s classic Satanic impregnation film Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the android housewife takeover film The Stepford Wives (1974), the hilarious whodunnit spoof Deathtrap (1982), the psycho-sexual thriller Sliver (1993) and The Stepford Wives remake (2004).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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