I don't know if the cliche is true and the seventies were the best period of American art cinema, but I am 100% positive they were the best for trashy movies with big stars. In any other decade, epics like The Towering Inferno and Airport 1975 would have just plain bad and boring, but something about seventies made these have a certain inate watchability and entertainment value, despite their dubious artistic quality. Although not a disaster film, The Boys from Brazil belongs in the company of those classics, meeting all the required elements- big stars, rediculous plotline, and pretending the film is of far more social value then it is.
The casting is amazing- it stars Gregory Peck as Jospeh Mengele, and what is even stranger is that the actor is very good. Peck is my favorite classic Hollywood-era star, and I always suspected that he had far more range than he was given credit for. This performance is a long, long way from Atticus Finch and just as convincing. Opposite Peck is Sir Laurence Olivier as Ezra Libermann, an old Austrian Nazi hunter. Olivier, who is locked in tight race with Marlon Brando as the finest actor of the 20th century, gives a good performance as well, although I think he recognized the movie was rediculous and had fun with his part. That was good choice, as there was probably no other way to keep the film's continous exposition interesting.
There is a big surprise as the end of the story, which I reveal here because it is well known and revealed on the video box. If you don't want to know, skip to the next paragraph. As the film opens in Paraguay, amateur Nazi hunter and Libermann fan Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg) has located Mengele who is now the leader of a group old and new Nazis in South America. Barry records a meeting of the group where Mengele orders the other facists to murder ninety four seemingly ordinary 65 year old men in Europe and North America. Although Barry is killed, he manages to warn Libermann beforehand, and the old man begins to investigate, discovering that Mengele has cloned ninety four copies of Hitler, and placed them into homes similer to the original to simulate their upbrinning, in the hopes that at least one of them will repeat the original's "achievements". The men are being killed because Hitler's father died when he was fourteen, and the evil doctor is taking every precaution to ensure that history repeats itself, possibly multiple times.
The movie takes itself seriously, but not seriously enough that it doesn't realizes it's rediculus. Shaffner, the director of Planet of the Apes and Patton makes the movie fun, although I did question whether using a real life figure as evil as Mengele in a cheesy movie was appropraite, when some of his victims still lived. There are a few scenes that are successful for real- such as when Libermann interogates a former concentration guard that he captured, or when scientists Bruno Ganz explains the methods of cloning. Olivier is such as good actor that he recognizes when the movie is being successfull as trash and when the movie is being sucessful as drama, and modifies his performance accordingly. Towards the end, the movie tries to get philisophical, but the characters, particularly the cloned Hitlers (Jeremy Black) are so badly written that it doesn't work. Although Hitler never spoke English, I doubt he would say, even as a teenager, something like "We got a real heavy-duty emergency here!"
There are some movies that offer intelligent looks into the human condition, or are so sublimley formulist, they offer an amazing experince the cinema can only provide. This is not one of them. It is fun, the kind of movie you want to see on TV when your bored, but somehow are too compelled to turn off when you think of something better to do.
The Boys From Brazil (1978)