The Boys from Brazil (1978)

The Boys from Brazil is a 1978 thriller film made by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and produced by Stanley O'Toole and Martin Richards with Robert Fryer as executive producer. The screenplay, by Heywood Gould, is loosely based on the novel of the same name by Ira Levin. It bears no relation to another film Boys from Brazil from 1993. The music score was by Jerry Goldsmith and the cinematography by Henri Decae.

Cast includes Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, James Mason, Lili Palmer, Uta Hagen, and a young Steve Guttemberg.

The Boys from Brazil is a guilty pleasure, a film that revels in its ridiculous plot and over the top performances to such a degree that you can’t help being swept along for the ride. Based on a novel by Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives) this is a B picture with an A-list cast.

Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele is alive and well and living in Paraguay but he’s not content. He hatches a secret plan for a Fourth Reich. With the help of a Nazi underground movement he puts his plan into operation, a scheme that requires the deaths of 94 men aged 65 over a period of years. The only man who can stop this from happening is Ezra Lieberman, an old Jew who’s devoted his life to bringing war criminals to justice.

As Lieberman, Olivier has moments of true brilliance. There are times though when it’s easy to see why he was Oscar nominated for such an unlikely film; when he interviews Nazi nurse Frieda Maloney in prison there is a level of emotion that feels real and in his final confrontation with Mengele his hatred in palpable.

If you were drawing up a wish list of actors to play an infamous German war criminal I doubt Gregory Peck would make the grade, yet someone clearly thought he was right for the part. On the plus side, he does cut an intimidating figure in his white suit with dyed black hair and moustache. Sadly his performance isn’t as successful as his appearance. It would have been nice to see what Peck could have done with a villainous role that better suited his talents as there are moments here that almost work — his scene with Olivier at the film's climax being a case in point. In fact Olivier was the reason Peck originally accepted the role as he wanted to work with the veteran actor.

The rest of the cast is filled with familiar faces from both sides of the Atlantic – James Mason as another Nazi, Steve Guttenberg as the young Jew who finds Mengele, Lilli Palmer as Lieberman’s sister plus Denholm Elliott, Rosemary Harris (now famous as Spider-Man’s Aunt May), Bruno Ganz, Michael Gough, and Prunella Scales. It’s a good cast, though only Guttenberg gets much to do and James Mason and Lili Palmer are criminally waisted.

At his peak Franklin J. Schaffner directed some all-time classics, Planet of the Apes and Patton just to name a couple, but he was coming to the end of his career by the time he made The Boys from Brazil. He does a workmanlike job, managing to take the outlandish plot and create a film that for all its faults still strangely compelling.

It’s not the sort of film that’s going to make anyone’s top ten list but I doubt I’m alone in having a soft spot for it. Peck as Mengele makes this essential viewing for curiosity value alone.

Uta Hagen was an influential acting teacher who taught, among others, Matthew Broderick, Christine Lahti, Jason Robards, Sigourney Weaver, Liza Minnelli, Whoopi Goldberg, Jack Lemmon, Charles Nelson Reilly, Manu Tupou, Debbie Allen and Al Pacino. She was a voice coach to Judy Garland, teaching a German accent, for the picture Judgment at Nuremberg. Garland's performance earned her an Academy Award nomination. While being profiled in Premiere magazine, actress Amanda Peet said of her mentor Hagen that she was a woman whose class you didn't want to miss.

Olivier plays a Nazi-hunter in this film, whilst in the previous Marathon Man (1976), he played Dr. Christian Szell, a Nazi physician modeled after Mengele (who was still living during the filming of both movies). In Marathon Man, Szell is known as "The White Angel," whereas Mengele was known as the "Angel of Death."