User Reviews

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.

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.

"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.

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.)

"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.

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.

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!

[ * possible spoilers * ]I had seen bits & pieces of this high camp classic over the years but finally had a chance to see it from beginning to end on American Movie Classics, and I am dumbstruck. It's a real challenge to describe how truly ridiculous the thing is.

Perhaps the best place to start is with the two leads. I somehow can envision Olivier and Peck getting together after having seen the script, and then, before the start of shooting, making a wager as to who can come up with the worst accent. It's a tossup; Peck's attempt at a German accent was not outdone in hilarity for almost twenty years, when Brad Pitt in "Seven Years in Tibet" seemed to use it a model and outdid himself. Olivier's Jewish accent puts one in mind of a tipsy Harold MacMillan doing an impersonation of David Ben-Gurion (you Gen-Xers will just have to look those names up in Wikipedia).

As far as their acting itself, words fail. Peck's Mengele is so cartoonish - as are all the Nazis here - as to seem to belong in "Hogan's Heroes". Portrayals so stereotyped drain away all terror and move things to the level of comedy. Olivier's Lieberman does not help matters; what is supposed to be a portrait of a dedicated Nazi hunter is so shot through with fleeting attempts at Borsch-belt humor as to come off as a poor impersonation of Myron Cohen (..back to Wikipedia, kids).

The high - or low - point, and the scene which almost makes one believe that humor was the real goal, is the famous party scene, with the ballroom draped in swastikas. Mengele, interrupting Mundt's "second honeymoon" dance with his stunningly ugly hag wife, throttling him to the ground on top of the hors d'oeuvres, and Frau Mundt's asking for a doctor only to have Mengele growl 'I AM a doctor, you stupid bitch', puts one in mind of some of the more classic moments from the Three Stooges. Could Mel Brooks have had a hand in this production? Talk about shades of "Springtime for Hitler" ("Maytime for Mengele" ???) !

It is true that what was in 1978 a ridiculously far-fetched plot device, human cloning, has become with the passage of time a frightening possibility. None the less, the idea of a hundred teenaged Xeroxes of Der Fuehrer set to "go off" around the Globe is still a concept that seems to have come out of an episode of "Get Smart", as does the whacky script.

How so many big names - Peck & Olivier, James Mason, Denholm Elliot, Uta Hagen, and Lilli Palmer - allowed themselves to be bamboozled into the making of this stinker must remain a mystery. Maybe they were paid VERY well. It must be noted that the elegant Lilli Palmer retains her classic beauty even despite the passing of time (she died 8 years after this flick; thank goodness she was able to to redeem herself by making a few more movies).

Having said all these nasty things, it must be conceded that the production values here are extremely high; the movie looks great. Everything is beautifully shot, setting off the on-location scenes wonderfully. But to have all this technical skill employed in the service of such silliness is like the mountain laboring and bringing forth a mouse, as they say.

The movie is worth watching, I suppose, but only if viewed as camp.

I saw this movie when it first came out and I really enjoyed it. Compared to today's more authentic period pieces, it might not stand up that well… yes, the accents are pretty bad, for example… but all things considered I thought it was well done and I've seen it several times, the most recent being just last night. I loved the foreshadowing in the scene where one of the cloned boys lets Olivier's character into his house and is reflected an infinite number of times by the hallway mirrors… it appears to be nothing more than an odd directorial choice the first time through, but for those of us who know what's coming, it's a very clever device.

The dam scene was very intense and from the Trivia notes I gather it was a real dam, not a special effect. Very striking sequence in a very interesting location.

I didn't follow the bit about the dog's birthday… maybe that led somewhere in the book, but if it was explained in the film I must have missed it. There were a few other awkward moments here and there (I did chuckle at the cloning expert who could reproduce DNA at the drop of a hat yet demonstrated his high-tech theories and technique using a chalkboard and a film projector), but all in all I'd recommend this movie. Intriguing idea that translated very well to film, with a classic cast the likes of which we'll probably never see again.

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?

I vaguely remember reading the book a while ago, but I have never seen the movie until now.

The concept, of course, is excellent. What would happen if Hitler was cloned? Take it a step further and incorporate a heinous Nazi scheme to reproduce the psychological conditions that created Hitler, and you have an even better plot. But what may make for a good read (book doesn't seem to have made much of an impression on me though), doesn't really make for a good movie. Instead we get a rather weak thriller where the audience figures out the plot pretty quickly on, those with some familiarity with Hitler even faster than others. And once you figure out the plot, waiting for the protagonist to realize it becomes more of a frustrating chore of "come on, NOW do you get it?" And of course once the plan becomes known, we realize that it never will be stopped. (I must admit I never had any notions that Lieberman would kill the proto-Hitlers, so maybe that killed some of the suspense for me.)

Had Mengele's plan included the focus on just one boy, with the organization taking a more detailed interest in psychologically nudging the young man, perhaps Mengele feeding him quiet whispers to stir his hate, it might have been more compelling. Seeing them trying to replicate the exact details of Hitler's life over the years would make a cool movie. Engineer his series of failures and rejections, foster his hatred of Jews, that would be a scary film. There seems to be too much focus that just the death of the father would drive the child to become like Hitler. Hitler was far more a product of his times, than a product of the death of his father. Placing these children in prosperous families of western nations is hardly the circumstances that would replicate post WW I Germany.

To me the best part of the movie were the few minutes at the end. The scene in the hospital bed was probably the only thought provoking part of the film, asking the question, which Spielberg touched on in Munich, does the end justify the means? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Thankfully the character of Lieberman was wise enough to see down that road and closed that path right away.

The death of Mengele was another good scene, although also kind of a miss. Having Mengele whine as he died, showed him to be a less calculating and chilling villain that originally imagined. A sharp mind would have figured out what sort of impact the psychological trauma of having a child order an intruder mauled to death by his dogs would cause, and relish his death would help create the next Fuhrer rather than die in screams. Perhaps this was done for the sake of the audience to get some kind of positive resolution that the villain who caused so much pain got his comeuppance, but it would have been far more chilling to see that even in death Mengele was trying to accomplish his goal. Perhaps I'm seeing too much of The Emperor in this, daring Luke to strike him down, knowing the consequences.

Great concept, but the movie was weak in and of itself, and the idea could have been developed in a far more chilling fashion. With the current crop of "lets understand the evil" films on Hitler you'd wonder how this film would be made today, probably focus more on psychology and less on a thriller plot.

OK film to watch, but more enjoyable for the personal thoughts on "what if?" that it spawns.