TJE 7/3 – The Boys From Brazil (1978)

I heard Jon Stewart namecheck this movie a couple of times on "The Daily Show," so out of curiosity I looked it up. It's turned out to be a 70s thriller about Nazi-hunters and medical experiments, starring Lawrence Olivier, Gregory Peck, and James Mason, and sounded right up my alley. I wondered why I hadn't heard of it before. Then I watched the movie.

"The Boys From Brazil" starts out with an intriguing mystery. A young American in Peru, Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg), stumbles across a secret meeting of several prominent Nazis who have been living in hiding in South America, including Dr. Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) and Eduard Seibert (James Mason). Mengele orders the assassinations of 95 men across the globe over the next two years, all of them seemingly unremarkable and unrelated, except that all are 65 years old. Kohler manages to relay this information to a prominent, elderly Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier), before he is killed. So the task falls to Lieberman to uncover and put and end to the nefarious plot.

The particulars of that plot, however, border on the absurd. This is a film that only could have been made in this era, decades before certain scientific advancements, and back when people still worried there might be escaped Nazis living among us in secret. Based on the novel by Ira Levin, who also wrote "The Stepford Wives" and "Rosemary's Baby," it plays on fears that largely no longer exist, and thus hasn't aged very well as a serious thriller. If "The Boys From Brazil" were made today, it would probably be done in the style of something like "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," accentuating rather than downplaying all the pulpiness and that certain odd campiness that comes with everything Nazi these days.

It doesn't help that the film is very mediocre. The cast is the film's best asset. It's nice to see Mason and Olivier on the screen in any capacity, and they play the parts assigned to them as well as anyone could have. Olivier in particular disappears into the kindly Lieberman as easily as he became the evil Nazi dentist Szell of "Marathon Man" two years earlier. Gregory Peck makes only a passable Dr. Mengele, and he's much stiffer than he should be. He avoids being camp in any sense, which is probably why he was cast in the first place, but I couldn't help wishing that Peck could have switched roles with either Mason or Olivier for better scenery-chewing potential. I want to point out a very young Steve Guttenberg, oddly resembling a clean-cut Seth Rogen, who acquits himself admirably as the doomed hero of the first act. Other familiar actors like Denholm Elliot, Bruno Ganz, and Uta Hagen pop up in smaller roles.

Until Mengele's plans are revealed, the mystery and suspense elements work very well. Jerry Goldsmith's score lends a lot of atmosphere and tension, in a way that not enough movie scores do anymore. Director Franklin J. Schaffner gets a lot out of his locations, particularly the streets of Peru, Mengele's clinic in the wilderness, and the rural Pennsylvania farmlands where the climax takes place. The action and chase scenes work, and the Nazis are credibly menacing. However, the truth about the conspiracy is pretty easy for a modern viewer to work out once you're past a certain point in the story, but the filmmakers take extra care to make sure that a 1973 audience would be able to comprehend what was then unfamiliar, cutting-edge scientific theory. The explanations can't help but get tedious.

Another problem is Jeremy Black, the young actor who plays a crucial role in the film's third act. His character is supposed to come off as sinister and perhaps otherworldly. Black looks striking enough, but his acting skills leave a lot ot be desired. I felt sorry for the poor kid, thrown into scenes with Peck and Olivier where he doesn't come off well at all. This is really the fault of whoever cast him, and whoever saddled him with some very poor, tin-ear dialogue. Between Black and Peck, the finale turned into a total farce, and Olivier looked like he just wanted to go home.

It feels like "The Boys From Brazil" was meant to follow in the footsteps of "Marathon Man" or "The Odessa File," films that certainly had their genre flourishes, but were completely serious thrillers. With its third act jaunt into science-fiction, "The Boys From Brazil" just isn't the same kind of material, and I think it suffers a bit from being played so straight. I think it would have made for a far more memorable horror film in the right hands. As it is, the movie has its charms, but it's easy to see why it didn't survive the seventies.
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