Deliciously campy! | The Boys From Brazil | Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier

Great | The Boys From Brazil | Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier

DVDs:


	• The Boys From Brazil Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier Lions Gate, 1999 average customer review:based on 60 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A scary film with modern day ramifications

Lawrence Oliver and Gregory Peck are chillingly adept as Nazi Hunter and Nazi in this surprisingly good 1978 Science-Fiction.

Also look out for James Mason, Prunella Scales and Steve Guttenberg who have small roles in this intriguing movie that is surprisingly suspenseful.

Oliver plays a determined Nazi Hunter based on real life Simon Wiesenthal who sets out to find the elusive Dr Mengele, portrayed by Peck who has been hiding out in South America since the end of the war.

In his search Oliver makes a ghastly discovery: Mengele has been experimenting with genetics and has managed to clone several copies of Adolf Hitler, all now living in different countries growing up as supposedly ordinary boys with a deadly difference. Mengele's plan is to recreate Hitler's early in as many ways as possible, from placing the children with docile women married to aggressive and overbearing fathers, to the death of the boys fathers early on in the cloned Hitler's lives. Mengele hopes the environment he has woven for these boy-clones will be self-fulfilling and that they will follow in Hitler's footsteps, thus resurrecting the Nazi order of 30 years ago.

What Mengele hasn't counted on though is the interference of a determined Nazi Hunter in the shape of Oliver, as well as Israel's deadly Secret Service in the guise of Mossad who have no intension of a Fourth Reich rising from the ashes of the Third. There are several disturbing scenes such as Mengele's attempt to genetically alter some South American Indians, and the Doberman dogs trained to kill on command. One of the best performances is given by the young cloned Hitler played to perfection by Jeremy Black whose vivid blue eyes are a constant reminder of who and what he could become.

Mengele is ironically killed by one of the clones who finds out that the Doctor ordered the death of his father, and in a calculated act of compassion spares Oliver's life, and inadvertently saves his own because Oliver is the only person left alive who knows in where all over the world the cloned children are living.

Oliver refuses to tell Mossad where the children are, because he knows they will be killed, thus bringing into the storyline the element of ethics where genetics is concerned. Despite heavy critical panning, "The Boys from Brazil" is both suspenseful and chilling and Oliver and Peck give credible performances as Jew and Nazi hell-bent on each other's destruction.

Considering this film was made in a time when bad film were in abundance "The Boys from Brazil" is worth renting or buying if you have the chance. It probably is one of the first films to look at the concept of genetics with any real intelligence and for that alone you can forgive Peck his over dyed black hair, and Oliver's attempt at a proper German accent.

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Deliciously campy!

This is one of the most unintentionally funny movies ever made. The usually stoic and serious Gregory Peck goes against type as the vicious Dr. Mengele and delivers his campiest and most amusing performance. You can literally see the delight on Peck's face as he deliberately overacts and hams it up to perfection. His finale scene with Laurence Oliver is a scene-stealer of the first order. When Olivier asks lamely, "Did you kill Wheelock?" Peck answers with ripping sarcasm, "No! He's in the kitchen, fixing us cocktails." You have to see it to believe it. The last twenty minutes of this film is exceptional.

James Mason is unfortunately wasted here in a small and needless role. Olivier delivers a puny and insipid performance (he was very ill throughout the filming) and the rest of the supporting cast are utterly forgettable. But it's worth seeing for Gregory Peck alone and this campy film belongs lock, stock and barrel to him. If you love films that take themselves too seriously, then "Boys from Brazil" should be near the top of your list. The rousing soundtrack is outstanding, listen particularly to the theme during the opening credits. Rousing indeed!

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Great

I loved the Ira Levin novel on which this film was based, and I loved the film itself. Good international intrigue.

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Interesting....for the wrong reasons.

This film is an interesting and amusing one...but not in the way it tries so hard to be. Far from being a riveting and terrifying plot, the idea of a cloned evil person (replicated 64 times) is amusing--particularly when the 'evil person' is a self centered adolescent, spoiled by doting parents. I was, instead of being terrified by this idea, struck by how much the 14-year-old reminded me of the kids at the local shopping mall. And by how much the final scene show-down between the Aryan and the Jews resembles a meeting of our local planning commission. Intended to be a threatening glance into hell-on-earth, this film is a trivial performance by great actors and the enlightment of its message is reduced to the banal when compared to the conflicts and social trends of the world in which we live in the year 2001.

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