What an absurd story was 1978's THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL! Nazi scientists, SS, Gestapo and military leaders have been smuggled out of Europe. Many of them live under the protection of military dictatorships in South America. They travel freely to countries around the Free World (including the United States). They own companies, have security forces, carry out para-military operations. Twenty years after World War II, some of them are continuing experiments they began in the Concentration Camps. One of them is a notorious War Criminal named Josef Mengele, "The Angel of Death of Auschwitz," who has the crazy idea that he can clone . . . HUMANS!

Absurd! Far-fetched! Nonsensical! Hard to follow! Those were some of the greetings critics gave THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL when it was released.

The most hysterically incongruous element, critics declared, was that Josef Mengele was played be Gregory Peck, long time lanky, stereotypical Hollywood hero of 50 films, in most of which he played a True Blue American (e.g., TWELVE O'CLOCK HIGH or TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD). In THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL, with jet-colored hair and moustache, he looked like a tall, trimmed down . . . well . . . Adolph Hitler in disguise. What's more, in THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL, Peck/Mengele is tracked through half a dozen countries by none other than Sir Laurence Olivier, who plays a character very like Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and he ends up in an undignified wrestling match with Peck!

The critics were not kind.

This absurd, far-fetched fantasy begins in Asuncion, Paraguay, where a young Israeli agent, Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg), is trailing a suspicious pair of men from a German-style beer garden to the airport. At the airport, they greet some arrivees and hurry them into a car. Kohler recognizes the men and follows the car to an estate outside the City.

Kohler then recruits a young boy to infiltrate the compound, and he phones Vienna to report his discoveries, trying to enlist the interest of Investigator Ezra Lieberman (Olivier) and his wife Esther (Lili Palmer). The Liebermans are living in near poverty, pouring their finances into exposing Nazi War Criminals. They dismiss Kohler's reports as being too far off, too vague.

Kohler presses on.

We witness the arrival of Josef Mengele (Peck), stepping from a Feisler Storch into a spotlight, surrounded by admirers. He has come to be the Key Note Speaker at a Convention of Nazis. He wants "The Comrades," as they are known, to seek out 90-odd civil servants, 65 years-old, and murder them for the Fatherland. It is the penultimate step in an experiment of 30 years duration. Mengele shows extreme affection for women, dogs and small children, but when Kohler's small spy is caught with a disguised radio transmitter, he orders the boy's death with a callous immediacy. Kohler himself follows soon after.

News brought of the young investigator's death prods Lieberman's conscience and curiosity. From that point, the story bifurcates. Mengele's agents fan out to find and snuff out insignificant civil servants in England, Austria, Germany, and the United States. Lieberman follows the string of murders, interviewing the survivors, finding new leads, trying to figure out the answer to the puzzle of why these men are being singled out.

In the course of his investigation, Lieberman encounters a dozen characters, played by a brilliant International cast: Rosemary Harris, Anne Meara, Prunella Scales, Michael Gough, John Dehner, and Denholm Elliot. The key interview is with Frieda Maloney (the magnificent Uta Hagen), a German National married to an American, who placed over 20 sets of separated orphaned twins from Brazil, through New York adoption agencies, between 1964 and 1967. She is being held, for reasons not made clear, in a maximum security prison in West Germany. Here Lieberman begins to sense the scope of the plot.

At the same time, the upper echelon of the Nazi Organization, represented primarily by Eduard Seibert (James Mason), is disturbed by the expense and danger of Mengele's experiment, and they take steps to curtail his operations in Brazil and Paraguay, forcing him to take a personal hand. This factor leads to a rousing, creepy and satisfying conclusion in New Providence, Pennsylvania, of all places.

We now know, of course, that numerous Nazi scientists and spies were recruited by Western Intelligence Agencies to fight Communism. A special Displaced Persons Act allowed many of them to settle in the U.S. Some of them founded large American companies like TCI. We know that under General Otto Skorzeny, Hitler's personal SS # 007, and others, a "werewolf operation did indeed slip high ranking SS Officers and War Criminals into Spain, into North Africa, and out of Europe to South America. Concentrations of these Nazis were protected by General Vargas and his successors in Brazil, General Stroesser in Paraguay and General Peron in Argentina. It is said a large community of old Nazis, their children and grandchildren, still exists in Southern Chile.

In 1978, when THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL appeared, Adolph Eichmann had already been captured, kidnapped from Argentina, returned to Israel by Mosad agents, tried and executed. But Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyon," remained at large, employed and protected by the U.S. Government, serving as an interrogation "advisor" to the secret police of several South American countries; and the activities of the historical Dr Josef Mengle remained murky, certainly in the minds of the public (and movie critics).

We know that Mengele, the lone figure in a spotless white uniform and gloves, who greeted incoming trains at Auschwitz, was interested in what we now call "cloning." Son of an upper middle class Bavarian manufacturing family, he joined the Nazi Party as a young doctor in the late 1920's and plunged into the Nazi eugenics program. Appointed Deputy Medical Officer at Auschwitz in 1943, he specialized in experiments on twins, housing them in a special wing, measuring them, feeding them peculiar diets, often treating them with a chilly kindness -- until he murdered them and performed meticulous post mortems on their bodies. Strangely enough, those who knew him best said his most overt anger and brutality was directed toward Roma and Sinta (Gypsy) young, rather than Jewish children.

Twenty years later, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL looks pretty good, and it is much easier to understand; seems ahead of its time, in fact. With the birth of "Dolly the Sheep" in Edinburgh two years ago, we know that cloning of mammals is possible, and given the power seeking and greedy nature of our political and commercial institutions, it seems only a matter of time before humans will be cloned. In fact, Asa Lieberman travels to Sweden in the film, where he takes in an interesting and pretty accurate illustrated lecture by Professor Bruckner (Bruno Ganz) on the basic science behind cloning.

In 1993, a banner year for restorations evidently, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL was reprocessed, and five crucial moments of the original were returned to the cut. The Direction of Franklin Schaffner (PLANET OF THE APES, 1968; PATTON, 1970), the excellent cast, the music of Jerry Goldsmith (CHINATOWN, 1975; LA CONFIDENTIAL, 1998), and the photography of Henri Decae (BOB LE FLAMBEUR, 1955; SUNDAYS AND CYBELE (1962); NIGHT OF THE GENERALS, 1966) were never better. Olivier, Goldsmith and Film Editor Robert Swink were nominated for Academy Awards, but in the light of the film's critical reception, they never had a chance.

The screen play by Heywood Gould, from Ira Levin's novel, may be indeed be a problem. There are things in the film that I don't quite understand, but perhaps I just don't know enough about the facts behind the story.

One thing I do know: One day in 1985, seven years after THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL was widely ridiculed, an old man, just returned from a visit to his family in Bavaria, went swimming in Brazil. He had a stroke, drowned, and all efforts to revive him were futile. It took an exhumation years later to confirm his death, but the files of Dr Josef Mengele on the cloning of blue eyed twins, etc, have never been found.

THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (restored) was recently released on DVD.

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UPDATE (August 10, 2001): In light of the current and growing debate on stem cell research and cloning, this film has become particularly relevant. Brigitte Boiselier, director of Bahamas Clonaid, stood at a conference of the National Academy of Sciences two days ago, with colleagues Paniaotis Michael Zavos of the Andrology Institute of America (based in Kentucky) and Dr. Severino Antinori of the University of Rome, to declare that "if we continue to refine our technology," there is every reason to believe they will succeed in cloning humans.

THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL no longer seems so far fetched.



Recommended: Yes