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The Boys From Brazil (5-Oct-1978)

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner

Writer: Heywood Gould

From novel: The Boys From Brazil by Ira Levin

Keywords: Thriller, Nazis, Clones

An American college student discovers Dr. Josef Mengele hiding in South America; he informs skeptical Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman but is murdered before he can give full details. Later, Lieberman is able to learn that Mengele has authorized the killings of civil servants around the world, all aged 65, all of whom are fathers who have adopted a child. Received Oscar nominations for Best Actor, Best Score, and Best Editing.

NameOccupationBirthDeathKnown for
John Dehner
Actor
23-Nov-1915 4-Feb-1992 Carousel
Denholm Elliott
Actor
31-May-1922 6-Oct-1992 A Room with a View
Bruno Ganz
Actor
22-Mar-1941 16-Feb-2019 Downfall
Walter Gotell
Actor
15-Mar-1924 5-May-1997 Gen. Gogol in James Bond films
Michael Gough
Actor
23-Nov-1917 17-Mar-2011 Alfred in Batman films
Steve Guttenberg
Actor
24-Aug-1958   Police Academy
Uta Hagen
Actor
12-Jun-1919 14-Jan-2004 Renowned thespian and acting teacher
Rosemary Harris
Actor
19-Sep-1927   Aunt May in Spider-Man
James Mason
Actor
15-May-1909 27-Jul-1984 North by Northwest
Anne Meara
Comic
20-Sep-1929 23-May-2015 Stiller and Meara
Laurence Olivier
Actor
22-May-1907 11-Jul-1989 Shakespearean actor
Lilli Palmer
Actor
24-May-1914 27-Jan-1986 The Four Poster
Gregory Peck
Actor
5-Apr-1916 12-Jun-2003 To Kill A Mockingbird
Wolfgang Preiss
Actor
27-Feb-1910 27-Nov-2002 A Bridge Too Far
Prunella Scales
Actor
22-Jun-1932   Fawlty Towers

REVIEWS

Review by movievikinglady (posted on 8-Feb-2005)

With human cloning in the news... and becoming more of a medical reality, this 1970's movie still clicks today.

Real life Dr. Mengele (played by Gregory Peck) is inserted into a fictional scenario. This 1970's Mengele has cloned and adopted out some baby Hitlers from Der Fuehrer's tissue taken years earler.

Dr. Mengele's Brazil laboratory, complete with mangled persons he has clearly experimented on, is clearly reminiscent of "Dr. Moreau's Island", the Victorian H. G. Wells sci-fi story about a mad doctor who manipulates human tissue for his own evil schemes...

Yes, fiction and fact meet... I am totally confident the real Mengele would have LOVED to have cloned Hitler, were the technology available to him.

This producer got great actors for this movie... For instance, Sir Laurence Olivier is Lieberman, the fictional Nazi hunter (based on real life Simon Wiesenthal) who tries to stop Mengele's evil plot... and James Mason is the quiet, genteel, cultured man -- who once ran Nazi death camps.

The movie score for this movie sounds like Strauss on Drugs... a kind of Viennese waltz that seems to spin out of control.

Note: The DVD unedited movie means that there is a gratuituous nude murder scene with a young woman (irrelevant to the basic plot -- not missed in the edited TV version) and also some other violence, particularly from one of the young teen Hitlers... but that's what your "skip scene" on your remote is for...

Watch and be chilled by the real life horror possible from human cloning...


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