(NOTE: I meant to post this weeks back, since it was on TCM late one night during a Jerry Goldsmith special, which included a screening of CAPRICORN ONE. Shit happens.)
THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1978) - **1/2When a grand heinous crime has been committed, but public desire for justice is denied because the perpetrator has escaped justice, the culture will create resolution for itself. As we saw in David Fincher's brilliant ZODIAC, the Zodiac Killer is never caught, so Hollywood has Clint Eastwood confront and blast away a Zodiac-esque serial killer in DIRTY HARRY. Boom, case closed.
THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL itself deals with Josef Mengele, the infamous "Angle of Death" at Auschwitz who conducted horrible unspeakable human experiments. The greatest Nazi war criminal never to be apprehended, he fled to South America and continued hiding until his drowning in 1979, and if rumors are to be believed, the Mad Doctor continued his scientific abomination with help from the military dictatorships of Argentina and Paraguay.
But in 1976, Mengele was still one of the more notorius global fugitives, and that same year Ira Levin's best-selling novel THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL gave us a rather frightening, fantastically evil scheme being implemented by Mengele and the other outlaw Nazis of ODESSA: Cloning Adolf Hitler.
I've never read the book, but my mother swears to me that its leagues better than the adaptation (but don't all novel fans say that?) and I guess I'll have to take her word for it. As for the film itself, its both a good and bad movie.
The badness starts when BOYS opens with a lone American Jewish youth down in South America, risking life and limb to capture audio and visual evidence of what ancient Nazis and Neo-Nazi youths are planning...and he's played by Steve
Goddamn Guttenberg. Yes, POLICE ACADEMY's Steve Guttenberg. Man oh man; I should have known that he would be an omen of things to come. It doesn't help that his usual whiney-voice refuses to let me take his character seriously, and plus he gets a kid killed in this movie.
Asshole.
Then there is Gregory Peck as Mengele. I mean, its gutsy casting to cast Atticus Finch as someone utterly evil, and certainly Peck's towering presence works for him here, but that super duper heavy black hair dye and German accent that's all over the place....silly is the word.
But to be rather honest, I almost was willing to forgive all that simply because of Sir Laurence Olivier. THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL was one of Olivier's paychecks for his family after being diagnosed with the muscle disease Dermatomyositis, but he's rather awesome as an aging Nazi hunter in world where the Jewish youth are too busy either dancing disco or snorting coke, and nobody else really gives a shit about war criminals thirty years on the lam. Plus, unlike Peck, his accent doesn't stick out for the wrong reasons. He scored an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for this flick.
A good scene, and probably why he landed that nomination, is when he is questioning a former Nazi mistress at a German jail, and you know if that if he could, and was decades younger, he would strangle her...but he can't, and she knows it. She even taunts him when he asks about the mysterious amount of orphan boys being sent to peculiar households around the world:
"Why you ask? I doubt you'll discover any secret grandchildren alive
now!"
Wow, what a bitch.
There is some touches in BOYS that I liked, from ODESSA being is as strong by the end as it was in the beginning, and I even sort of dug how Mengele gets all upset when his precious experiment is threatened with cancellation by ODESSA's German Aryan stud beefcake henchmen when they're unleashed upon the guy's island labs. Twenty years down the drain this side of waiting for the fourth INDIANA JONES movie.
This includes the hocus pocus regarding how the cloned Hitlers around the world would repeat his psychological ascent through living in the same family conditions. Like a Michael Crichton book, I bought the idea behind a science fiction premise that I know is most likely impractical in real life.
Director Franklin Schaffner, who shot PATTON and the original PLANET OF THE APES, helmed for the most part a competent if unremarkable mystery thriller, but if you want a great example of everything good and bad about this movie, take the finale between Olivier and Peck. So much heat in that last confrontation, so much animosity by Olivier against Peck, and how is all that resolved? A fist fight.
Yes, old men duking it out, and its as hilarious as the cripple on SOUTH PARK, but I guess Schaffner didn't mean for this to be funny. Plus, there is a great throwaway shot when the "father" of one of the American Hitler clones tells Peck: "Hey, I got nothing against you Nazis and Jews, for the real problem is those blacks".... and really, that to me is a wasted cool idea.
I mean, if such an elaborate ambitious scheme as THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL was actually hatched, whom would the American Fuhrer lead the majority whites against? In the 1970s, probably the African-Americans.... but in 2008, more like Mexicans, or any Latino that the Minute Men think jumped the border fence. Of course, maybe Schaffner knew to make concept clear without hammering it into our skulls.
Or maybe I need to quit reviewing crap like IRON EAGLE.
On a final note, Turner Classic Movies showed this and CAPRICORN ONE together as part of their showcase on the great late composer Jerry Goldsmith, but lets be honest, if TCM were wanting to actually highlight his best cinema soundtracks, they should have included PATTON and the first STAR TREK movie as well. While THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL did earn Goldsmith an Oscar nod, TCM might as well have re-titled their "The Films of Jerry Goldsmith" line-up into "The Films of Jerry Goldsmith We Could Afford The Rights to Tonight." Bitching aside, they did at least show THE WIND & THE LION, which has an underrated kickass Goldsmith score, so TCM is still cool in my book.
