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The Boys from Brazil (film)
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The Boys from Brazil is a 1978 Academy Award-nominated thriller film 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 of the same name by Ira Levin. It bears no relation to another film Boys from Brazil from 1993 .
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Encyclopedia
The Boys from Brazil is a 1978 Academy Award-nominated thriller film 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 of the same name by Ira Levin. It bears no relation to another film Boys from Brazil from 1993 . 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 was expected to start in early 2008.
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 diabolical plan by surviving Nazi death-camp doctor Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) to clone Adolf Hitler.
When well-intentioned young Barry Kohler stumbles upon a secret sect of Third Reich war criminals holding clandestine meetings in Paraguay, he alerts Ezra Lieberman by phone. Lieberman is well aware that Dr. Mengele is alive and in hiding, but is highly skeptical 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.
Lieberman's investigations unnerve Mengele's superiors, who demand that he abort his scheme. But the mad doctor has spent twenty years pursuing his fiendish plans, having acquired skin and blood samples from Hitler to use as DNA in a sinister, far-ahead-of-its-time plan to recreate the Führer body and soul and to fulfill the aims of the Third Reich.
For him it is now or never. Mengele ends up traveling to rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where one of the young Hitler clones lives on a farm. There he murders the boy's father (a breeder of killer Dobermans) and lies in wait for his hated nemesis Lieberman, who is on his way.
They fight savagely until Mengele gains the upper hand. Mengele then taunts Lieberman with his hopes of turning the world into one run by Hitler clones. With one desperate lunge, Lieberman reaches the closet where the dogs are held and turns them loose. The dogs corner Mengele. 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 the pack of vicious Doberman dogs on Mengele, relishing his bloody death and avenging his father's 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. The film ends with Bobby happily developing photos he took during the dog attack implying that the savage seed of Adolf Hitler is upon the land.
Principal cast
Award and nominations
Academy Awards Nominations
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 generally liberal political activities.
- Bruno Ganz, who plays Professor Bruckner, went on to play Adolf Hitler in Der Untergang (2004).
- Gunter Meisner, who plays Farnbach, also went on to play Adolf Hitler in the 1983 miniseries adaptation of Herman Wouk's The Winds of War.
- 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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