At least a year or more ago, I read Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil.  This is an interesting thriller with a somewhat ridiculous plot – Joseph Mengele and other escaped Nazis living in South America carry out a sinister experiment to clone a bunch of ‘baby Hitlers’ based on saved cells he had obtained from Hitler during the war.  Then when old enough, the babies are farmed out to foster parents in the USA and Europe with similar background demographics to that of Hitler’s original parents, and monitored to attempt to duplicate AH’s upbringing as much as possible to bring about the desired result (Hitler rises again to power and brings back Nazi control, of the world this time around).

A movie was made of this book in 1978, starring Gregory Peck, Lawrence Olivier and James Mason.  While naturally the movie cuts some of the details a bit short, it’s an entertaining view.  Other actors include a VERY young Steve Gutenberg as a cub reporter monitoring the Nazis in Paraguay; the familiar Walter Gotell (played the Russian spy boss in several Roger Moore James Bond films); Denholm Elliott (may remember him as Dan Ackyroyd’s butler in Trading Places, among his many other films, including at least a couple of the Indiana Jones movies).

IMHO Gregory Peck is the main reason to watch this movie.  Not only is he playing against type (here he’s the E-VIL arch villain, normally he’s the good guy everyone roots for) he goes for broke in playing the character, probably not unlike the real Mengele (who apparently was still alive in South America when this movie premiered in the theaters).  There are a number of scenes where he all but loses it (or DOES lose it) and goes apes*** – great fun and way over the top.

I thought Laurence Olivier was good too, but while he’s the good guy nazi-hunter, his character is a bit whiny and somewhat annoying – maybe that’s the way the real Simon Wiesenthal was?  Not sure.

It was also fairly surreal to see Bruno Ganz in this movie as a minor character in this movie – given that much more recently he played Hitler himself in Downfall, and of course starred in all those ridiculous ‘Hitler meme’ videos on YouTube as a result.

It’s always interesting to watch ‘alternative history’ movies generally (unless they really suck acting-wise or just present way too lame a plot premise) – this one doesn’t disappoint.

Other views:

Rotten Tomatoes

FeoAmante

candybowl

Tags: 70's, fantasy, freaks, horror, malevolence, military, movies, mythology, sci-fi, technology

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