Review of The Boys from Brazil (1978) by Edith N — 13 Nov 2009

At Least They Got Cloning Right.

Ira Levin wrote seventeen works in forty-four years. This is an astonishingly low figure, though of course Harper Lee only wrote--or at least only finished and shared--one. Though for her, there's still hope. She's alive, and Levin died a couple of years ago. At any rate, of his seven novels, five were made into movies. Oddly, I've read five, including the two which weren't. This is one of the two I haven't--the other being [i]A Kiss Before Dying[/i]. Ergo, I cannot state if the book is quite so ludicrous as the movie. The book does, presumably, benefit from a complete and utter lack of Steve Guttenberg, so that's something, at least, but the plot is odd enough so that I'm not sure how it's possible to be better. Honestly, though, Ira Levin had a tendency to write comedy and satire which was then taken a little too seriously by the movie industry. On the other hand, there was the totally laughable nature of the remake of [i]The Stepford Wives[/i], which was horrible in all sorts of other ways.

Barry Kohler (Guttenberg) is down in Paraguay looking for escaped Nazis. He finds the big prize, Dr. Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck), and discovers that Mengele's up to something. Kohler calls famed Nazi hunter not-at-all-Simon-Wiesenthal Ezra Lieberman (dear old Baron Larry) to share his news, but Lieberman doesn't take him seriously--until Kohler is killed. Then, Lieberman gets pulled into the conspiracy Kohler found. It turns out Mengele is involved in a complicated plan to reproduce Hitler to take over where they failed before. He is part of a whole slew of Nazi war criminals who have escaped to Paraguay, one of those countries which wasn't extraditing. Mengele is their leader, presumably because he'd had the highest rank during the War. At any rate, they're doing whatever he says, even though a lot of them don't understand his plans. He is also, of course, well aware of the existence of Lieberman, and they spend quite a bit of the movie in a battle over Mengele's sinister plan.

Here's the good part. No one assumes that a clone of Hitler will turn out to be exactly like Hitler. Hitler was not solely a product of his genetics. What's more, the clones also start out the way clones do--as babies. We get a scene showing the room wherein the birth mothers stayed during their pregnancies. An important part of Mengele's plan involves raising the boys in situations that parallel Hitler's own upbringing as closely as possible. The boys are given to families with older fathers and younger mothers, though not all that young. The fathers are all civil servants--and they had to be killed at the age Hitler's father died. And so forth. I will note, however, two details. Number one, Hitler had siblings, and these boys seem to be raised as only children. Number two, of course, is that one of the factors which influenced Hitler the most cannot be controlled. World War I changed his life, not for the better, and Mengele couldn't possibly hope to engineer that. Also, I'm pretty sure they didn't make sure the fathers were illegitimate, and even if they had, it didn't have the same stigma anymore.

I think the goal in casting Gregory Peck was to give us someone we'd feel we trusted who turned out to be a monster. It might well also have been, for Peck, a chance to stretch his range some. After all, he was playing a real man and an evil man, and when you picture Gregory Peck, you still see Atticus Finch, don't you? Heck, I do, and my favourite movie is a completely different one which also stars Gregory Peck! Baron Larry, as we know, was in the point of his career where he was just doing things for the money. All told, there's a fairly impressive cast, leaving aside Steve Guttenberg. (IMDB tells us that Bruno Ganz, who is in this movie as a professor, played Hitler "several years later"--in [i]Der Untergang[/i], made in 2004, meaning that a quarter century is "several years.") Jeremy Black, who played the clones, never did anything else, which seems to be the case with people playing Hitler, I guess.

In essence, the moral of this film is that you cannot control who a boy becomes. At the end, it is suggested that the goal has succeeded, but of course Bobby Wheelock still doesn't do what Mengele wants him to. Will any of the other boys? And, rather more interestingly, what will having several of the boys mean? If they are the way the original was, working together will not be something which interests them terribly. The boys will, from the end of the movie, grow up in ways which cannot be sure to have been what Mengele and the others intended. Several people suggest quietly that Mengele's plan will not, as it happens, work, which makes Mengele a little upset. It's true that it will come closer to working than a lot of people's plans along those lines will. Again, I haven't read the book, but I rather suspect it had one major difference. This film is trying to be a thriller. Given what Levin has written elsewhere, he almost certainly intended it to be a dark comedy. Of course, it's hard not to see it as one, even given how they're attempting to show it here.