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The Boys from Brazil

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Average Customer Rating:	4.0
Release Date:	2009-04-07
Publisher:	Lions Gate
Actors:	Gregory Peck; Laurence Olivier; James Mason; Lilli Palmer; Jeremy Black
Aspect ratio:	1.85:1
Audience rating:	R (Restricted)
Format:	Closed-captioned; Color; DVD; Widescreen; NTSC
Language:	Original Language: English;
Weight:	0.16 pounds

Product Categories

Elliott, Denholm; Ganz, Bruno; Gotell, Walter; Gough, Michael; Guttenberg, Steve; Hagen, Uta; Harris, Rosemary; Hayden, Linda; Mason, James; Meara, Anne; Olivier, Laurence; Palmer, Lilli; Peck, Gregory; All Lionsgate Titles; Movies & TV on DVD and Blu-ray Disc Trade-In; DVD; Widescreen; R; US & CA DVDs: Region 1; 1970 - 1979; English; DVD

Product description

Alive and hiding in South America, the fiendish Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele (Peck) gathers a group of former colleagues for a horrifying project- he wants to clone Hitler. Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg) gets wind of the project and informs famed Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Olivier), but before he can relay the evidence, Kohler is killed. Mengele continues his murderous plot, creating 94 young Hitlers and killing their fathers to simulate the madman's own boyhood. As Mengele moves closer to producing global terror, Lieberman alone must discover the terrifying extent of his plan and stop it.

Gregory Peck hams it up big time in this 1978 thriller based on Ira Levin's bestselling novel. Peck plays an old German Nazi behind a mysterious series of murders, the investigation of which leads to an astonishing plot to create the Fourth Reich. Laurence Olivier is equally outrageous as a Nazi hunter who stumbles onto the scheme. Director Franklin Schaffner (Planet of the Apes) doesn't make any bones about the preposterousness of the story or of his legendary stars' performances, and a viewer is advised not to push too deeply into this tall tale for cautionary meaning. The film is a bit bloody--particularly unnerving in a climactic scene involving some attack dogs under the command of a young but familiar-looking monster. --Tom Keogh

Customer reviews

« Excellent Drama! »

From a post World War II perspective of Joseph Mengel, the story depicts the Nazi's use of Genetics and Enviromental science to bring back Hitler.

Rating: (5 out of 5) @ 2010-02-01

« Trying to get this one through again... »

The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978)

I think every major director working in the seventies was required to make a Nazi thriller. They cropped up like weeds there for a while, from Schlesinger's brilliant Marathon Man to Marcel Ophuls' The Memory of Justice to Fosse's Cabaret (if you want to stretch it a little, you could even throw in A Clockwork Orange as a freebie). Most of them, surprisingly, are pretty darn good, and Franklin J. Schaffner's entry, The Boys from Brazil, is no exception. Based on Ira Levin's odd horror-fantasy mix, it separates itself from the pack by positing a truly distressing question: what would happen if the Nazis who'd fled to South America, most of them doctors, had managed to perfect cloning technology and come up with a small stable of new Hitlers?

The leader of the pack, not surprisingly, is Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck), the very real-life Angel of Death who presided over the experimental labs at Auschwitz. Not a stretch to see him embracing Hitler's well-known love of the weird and occult and diving into the idea of cloning. Pitted against Mengele and his thugs are veteran Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier), who is contacted out of the blue one day by Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg in an early role), who claims to have found Mengele, and more, puts him at the center of some sort of conspiracy going on in Paraguay. Lieberman initially dismisses Kohler's claims, but when the boy goes missing, Lieberman decides he needs to see for himself what's going on. This throws a kink into Mengele's plans, as his superiors, fearing discovery, decide to shut down the project. Mengele is not happy about this, and decides to go rogue...

Peck, Olivier, and Guttenberg are joined by a truly outrageous cast, roughly analogous to the 1997 Yankees, but with actors. James Mason, Denholm Elliott, Uta Hagen, Rosemary Harris, Bruno Ganz, and a host of other instantly-recognizable seventies icons make appearances here and chew scenery for all they're worth. (You can't expect Shakespeare from the guy who gave the world Planet of the Apes, can you?) The whole thing often plays more like melodrama than science fiction, but in some way that just adds to the appeal of this unjustly neglected film; it's well worth going out of your way for, if you've never seen it. *** ½

Rating: (4 out of 5) @ 2010-01-27

« Very good. »

The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978)

I think every major director working in the seventies was required to make a Nazi thriller. They cropped up like weeds there for a while, from Schelsinger's brilliant Marathon Man to Marcel Ophuls' The Memory of Justice to Fosse's Cabaret (if you want to stretch it a little, you could even throw in A Clockwork Orange as a freebie). Most of them, surprisingly, are pretty darn good, and Franklin J. Schaffner's entry, The Boys from Brazil, is no exception. Based on Ira Levin's odd horror-fantasy mix, it separates itself from the pack by positing a truly distressing question: what would happen if the Nazis who'd fled to South America, most of them doctors, had managed to perfect cloning technology and come up with a small stable of new Hitlers?

The leader of the pack, not surprisingly, is Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck), the very real-life Angel of Death who presided over the experimental labs at Auschwitz. Not a stretch to see him embracing Hitler's well-known love of the weird and occult and diving into the idea of cloning. Pitted against Mengele and his thugs are veteran Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier), who is contacted out of the blue one day by Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg in an early role), who claims to have found Mengele, and more, puts him at the center of some sort of conspiracy going on in Paraguay. Lieberman initially dismisses Kohler's claims, but when the boy goes missing, Lieberman decides he needs to see for himself what's going on. This throws a kink into Mengele's plans, as his superiors, fearing discovery, decide to shut down the project. Mengele is not happy about this, and decides to go rogue...

Peck, Olivier, and Guttenberg are joined by a truly outrageous cast, roughly analogous to the 1997 Yankees, but with actors. James Mason, Denholm Elliott, Uta Hagen, Rosemary Harris, Bruno Ganz, and a host of other instantly-recognizable seventies icons make appearances here and chew scenery for all they're worth. (You can't expect Shakespeare from the guy who gave the world Planet of the Apes, can you?) The whole thing often plays more like melodrama than science fiction, but in some way that just adds to the appeal of this unjustly neglected film; it's well worth going out of your way for, if you've never seen it. *** ½

Rating: (4 out of 5) @ 2010-01-16

« Good 70's Thriller with Olivier and Peck »

The DVD is ok, but other than that, this is a very good film concerning the pursuit by an aging Nazi hunter, played by Laurence Olivier, of Dr. Josef Mengele, played by Gregory Peck. Good performances and a solid story concerning Mengele's attempt to create clones of Hitler and bring about the return of the Third Reich.

Rating: (4 out of 5) @ 2009-11-20

« intriguing »

wasnt sure at first but heard enough about this movie from friends and had to get it to find out what the hype was about.you have to use your imagination and just go with it.i enjoyed it alot.