1978: THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL

What’s it about?

This is going to sound crazy, but try to stay with me. Young freelance Nazi hunter Steve Guttenberg tips off old freelance Nazi hunter Laurence Olivier to a plot being hatched by diabolical Dr Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck!!) in South America. But Olivier only takes the warning seriously when Peck kills Guttenberg to prevent him from leaking information about his plans. (Look, I promise I am not making this up.)

The only thing Olivier knows is that reactivated Nazi sleeper agents plan to kill 94 sixty-five year old men over the next several years all over the world. He begins following up on the death of every sixty-five year old man in the world (or something -- details are sketchy here) and manages to piece together a theory when he discovers at least two of the victims have nearly identical twin sons... who also turn out to be Hitler clones! And not just any Hitler clones -- but rather Hitler clones who have been carefully placed throughout the world in conditions that mimic Hitler’s own childhood! Olivier must then -- well, you get the picture, but it all ends with Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck wrestling each other for control of a gun in the living room of a house belonging to a boy Hitler clone.

Is it any good?

This movie was adapted from a novel by Ira Levin, whose books also served as the source material for ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) and THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975). I wasn’t going to try and find any parallels among those different stories, but it did just occur to me that adopting Hitler’s clone is a little bit like birthing Satan’s spawn. And, um, the statistical approach that Peck/Mengele takes to creating a new Hitler sort of implies that people are robots who can be “programmed” by feeding in the right genetic and environmental inputs? Well, never mind. I was right the first time -- better not to even try.

In any event, Peck’s plan is pretty interesting, even if it’s not particularly plausible. The boys of the movie’s title are the ninety-four Hitler clones that Peck created in Brazil. He then has an adoption agency place them with families all around the world that are similar to Hitler’s family. Well, actually, they seem to focus primarily on the adoptive father -- ensuring that he’s a low-level government bureaucrat, somewhat older than his wife, and of a controlling temperament. Phase two of the plan is, after waiting fourteen years, to start bumping off those fathers around their sixty-fifth birthdays, which is presumably how Hitler’s own father died. (I couldn’t even be bothered to check Wikipedia to verify this fact. Sorry.)

The movie assures us that Peck has done lots of math to back up his plan. Not every clone placed in those circumstances will become Hitler, but chances are that at least one will. In fact, Peck is so convinced of the success of his project that he fully expects to produce redundant Hitlers. Presumably this is to guard against accidents that might strike before the clone can begin his political career, but it seems possible that two or three Hitlers simultaneously rising to power in different countries might disrupt the creation of a Fourth Reich.

Of course, there’s a big element missing from Peck’s plan that he can’t account for. Even if he’s right about the key events in Hitler’s boyhood, he’s not able to control outside factors in the rest of the world. Whatever perturbations that allowed Hitler to come to power in the 1930s wouldn’t necessarily be repeated in the 1980s. And even if these little Fuehrers did gain some kind of power (political, economic, military), there’s no reason to believe that they would perpetuate Nazi ideals. Presumably, Hitler would have latched on to whatever phenomenon would have allowed him to influence the German people at the time. What worked then wouldn’t work now -- so the new Reich that Peck is bringing about wouldn’t necessarily have any resemblance to the old one. All of which leaves one to wonder exactly what he’s after. Clearly it’s not a revival of Nazi ideals. It seems he simply wants to put Hitler back in power again, but the “why” is never explained, since none of the clones will ever know (or believe) that Peck had anything to do with their rise to power.

I said earlier that I think the premise of THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL is pretty neat, but I also think it doesn’t really stand up to any scrutiny at all. (See above.) But I’m always willing to let that slide -- I don’t think implausible plots are a good thing in sci-fi movies, but if the movie is internally consistent and otherwise interesting, then I won’t make a fuss about it. THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL mostly fulfills those two conditions, but there are still some things about it that give me more pause than usual.

One of the weirdest things about the movie is that Gregory Peck plays real-life Nazi war criminal Dr Josef Megele, who came to be known as the “Angel of Death” for his truly horrific experiments on prisoners. One line of his “research” involved attempts to bestow white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes on people who did not naturally have them using dyes and bleaches. (I did in fact look this part up on Wikipedia and was horrified by what I found.) It’s hardly conceivable that there could be any practical knowledge gained from these kinds of experiments, so they strike me as particularly sadistic and abhorrent. Yet, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL replicates such experiments to round out Peck’s character -- and the results are presented presumably for the entertainment of the audience.

Apart from that less-than-tasteful hiccup, I liked THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL pretty well. I have, unfortunately, ruined much of the enjoyment for the rest of you, as it was great fun trying to figure out what the plan actually was. It’s also kind of incredible how many heavy-hitting actors signed on for what is really a pulp adventure with the believability of the average airport thriller novel. I haven’t had occasion yet to mention that James Mason has a supporting role as a Nazi co-conspirator. Best known to sci-fi fans as the lead in the 1959 version of JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (you know -- the one with Pat Boone and the duck), he would be enough to class up any science fiction movie on his own. But here he plays third fiddle to Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck.

I wish, in fact, that I knew more about Laurence Olivier. But, much to my shame, I have apparently never seen any of his other pictures. (I feel that I shouldn’t admit that, as he was in a lot of undisputed classics -- not least of which is CLASH OF THE TITANS, the final film to feature Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion effects.) On the other hand, I am pleased that I can experience at least some of the cognitive dissonance that was no doubt intended by casting Gregory Peck as a sadistic war criminal. Even if the rest of the movie leaves you unimpressed, the sight of Atticus Finch sticking a knife into an impossibly young Steve Guttenberg is not something you’re likely to see every day.