The Boys from Brazil is a 1978 Academy Award-nominated thriller 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 The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin. It bears no relation to another film Boys from Brazil from 1993 [1]. The music score was by Jerry Goldsmith and the cinematography by Henri Decae. As of August 2006, an updated remake of this film is in the works with New Line Cinema, featuring director Brett Ratner and screenwriters Richard Potter and Matthew Stravitz. Production is expected to start late in early 2008.[1]The film was shot on location in Vienna, Austria; England; Portugal and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA.
Plot
The film follows the attempts of aging Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Sir Laurence Olivier) to discover and thwart a diablolical plan by surviving Nazi death-camp doctor Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) to clone Adolf Hitler.When well-intenioned young Barry Kohler stumbles upon a secret sect of Third Reich war criminals holding clandestine meetings in South America, he alerts Ezra Lieberman by phone. Lieberman is well aware that Dr. Mengele is alive and in hiding, but is highly sceptical otherwise.
Kohler is discovered and killed. Lieberman begins following the trail of the Nazis, traveling throughout Europe and North America to investigate the suspicious deaths of a number of civil servants. He meets several widows and is amazed to find an uncanny resemblance in their adopted, black-haired, blue-eyed sons.
His investigations unnerve Mengele's superiors, who demand that he abort his scheme. But the mad doctor has spent nearly thirty years pursuing this, having acquired skin and blood samples from Hitler to use as DNA in a sinister, far-ahead-of-its-time plan to recreate the Fuhrer body and soul.
For him it is now or never. Mengele risks traveling to rural Pennsylvania, where one of the young Hitler clones lives on a farm. There he murders the boy's father and lies in wait for his hated nemesis Lieberman, who is on his way.
They fight savagely until Mengele gains the upper hand. At that point, young Bobby arrives home from school. It is Mengele's first look in person at one of his "boys." Bobby can tell from the carnage that something is amiss. Lieberman tells him that Mengele has killed his father and to notify the police. The cruel young boy has other ideas. He sets a pack of vicious Doberman dogs on Mengele, relishing his bloody death.
Lieberman is encouraged by fellow Nazi hunters to expose the scheme and turn over a list identifying the names and whereabouts of the other "boys from Brazil" from around the world, so that they can be systematically killed before growing up. But they are mere children, in Lieberman's opinion, so he destroys the list.
Principal cast
Sir Laurence Olivier : Ezra Lieberman
James Mason : Eduard Seibert
Lilli Palmer : Esther Lieberman
Uta Hagen : Frieda Maloney
Steve Guttenberg : Barry Kohler
Denholm Elliott : Sidney Beynon
Gunter Meisner : Farnbach
Jeremy Black : Jack Curry/Simon Harrington/Erich Doring/Bobby Wheelock
Award and nominations
Academy Awards Nominations
Academy Award for Best Actor - Sir Laurence Olivier
Academy Award for Film Editing - Robert Swink
Academy Award for Original Music Score - Jerry Goldsmith
Golden Globe Awards Nomination
Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture Actor - Drama - Gregory Peck
Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films Saturn Award Nominations
Best Science Fiction Film
Best Actor - Sir Laurence Olivier
Best Director - Franklin J. Schaffner
Best Music - Jerry Goldsmith
Best Supporting Actress - Uta Hagen
Best Writing - Heywood Gould
Trivia
The character of Ezra Lieberman (Yakov Liebermann in the novel) is thought by many to be modeled on the famous real life Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
Olivier plays a Nazi hunter in this film whilst in Marathon Man (1976), he played Dr. Christian Szell, an evil Nazi doctor. Szell was known as 'The White Angel', whereas Mengele was known as the 'Angel of Death.'
Both of the lead actors, Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier, played General Douglas MacArthur in films produced roughly the same time as The Boys From Brazil: Peck in MacArthur (1977) and Olivier in Inchon (1981). Coincidentally, Jerry Goldsmith was the composer for each of those films as well as for The Boys from Brazil.
Peck's performance as the evil Mengele contrasts with the heroic roles he was most famous for playing, notably Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. The role was also a complete inversion of the actor's real-life beliefs, which were strongly devoted to tolerance, civil rights, and general liberal political activities.
Jeremy Black plays four teenaged Adolf Hitler clones; two of which are American, one British, and the other German (in all, Black performs using three different accents).
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