In 1967 Ira Levin became famous thanks to Rosemary’s Baby, his bestselling novel about the biblical Antichrist being born and raised in modern-day New York. A few years later Levin wrote The Boys from Brazil, another novel with a similar theme of apocalyptic evil being groomed in the modern world, although more grounded in hard science and real history. Like Rosemary’s Baby, it was quickly adapted for the silver screen, resulting in the eponymous 1978 thriller directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, one of the most effective and most critically underrated films of its time.
One of the two main characters is Dr Josef Mengele, a German scientist who, as a member of the SS during WW2, conducted medical experiments on children at Auschwitz concentration camp, which earned him the nickname “Angel of Death” and made him one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals. Despite his notoriety, after the war he managed to escape to Latin America and spent decades successfully evading attempts to locate him and bring him to justice. The plot begins in Paraguay where Barry Kohler (played by Steve Guttenberg), a young American Jewish activist, appears to succeed where so many had failed. He stumbles into Mengele (played by Gregory Peck) attending a conference of other exiled high-ranking Nazis and records details of Mengele ordering the murder of 94 men in various countries. Kohler is killed, but not before passing information to Ezra Lieberman (played by Laurence Olivier), an elderly Nazi hunter from Vienna, who, despite his poor health, travels around the globe to investigate the suspicious deaths of people who might have been part of Mengele’s diabolical plan. He finds that all the men were 65-year-old civil servants and all have 13-year-old sons who, despite having different parents in different parts of the world, look almost exactly the same.
Many critics rejected The Boys from Brazil because they found its plot “preposterous” despite the real-life Mengele, just like his fictional counterpart, successfully hiding during the premiere (only to die a few months later, which would be revealed to the world in 1985). Some even called the main premise – explained to the audience in a scene where Lieberman gets a brief lecture from a scientist played by Bruno Ganz – “unscientific” despite the premiere nearly coinciding with related advances in genetics and medical technology, including the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby”. Critics would have had more justification if they had concentrated on the casting, which in the case of Gregory Peck was not completely fortunate. Peck, who had built a reputation playing heroic and sometimes even saintly protagonists, obviously liked the opportunity to portray something quite opposite, but his role often succumbs to overacting closer to parody.
Laurence Olivier, who had recently played another diabolical Nazi villain in Marathon Man, also liked the idea of portraying something quite opposite. He played Lieberman (based on the real-life character of the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal) while his health was declining, but this condition actually helped the performance, making the film’s protagonist look frail and world-weary, and his task difficult both in confronting danger and a difficult ethical dilemma encountered at the very end. In this endeavour he was helped by other members of the cast, who successfully play supporting and sometimes potentially thankless roles. But the greatest asset of the film is the steady hand of director Franklin J. Schaffner, who superbly brings the audience into the complicated plot with many characters and various world locations, all with the help of cinematography by Henri Decaës and yet another great soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith.
Despite the critics’ enmity, The Boys from Brazil was quite a memorable film, and its value has risen through the years, with advances in biotechnology making its sinister premise even more disturbing. The film looks even more disturbing today, when certain powerful people in their tweets openly celebrate how all those pesky (sub)humans put under lockdowns are making this a cleaner and better world, espousing views not so different from this film’s main villain.
RATING: 8/10 (++)
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