If they survive...will we?


This film of Ira Levin's novel The Boys from Brazil wastes no time in establishing the fact that several seemingly unrelated men have been mysteriously murdered. Elderly Jewish Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier), brought into the case when the clues seem to point to a neo-fascist plot, traces the trail of evidence to Paraguay. Here he finds an unregenerate Auschwitz doctor, patterned on Joseph Mengele and played by -- of all people -- Gregory Peck. Lieberman discovers that the murdered men had all fathered sons who were identical -- the results of a cloning experiment, designed to create a race of incipient Hitlers.


A somewhat shorter version has been (still is?) available on video in the UK, Sweden and Denmark where all scenes related to a necklace found by Mengele in his old South American hospital have been removed. This meant that the film ended with Liebermann in the hospital bed burning the list of the boys remaining to be found. Perhaps a somewhat more optimistic ending than the original showing Bobby Wheelock in possesion of the necklace and developing pictures of the wounded Mengele and Lieberman.


The Boys from Brazil is a 1978 British-American thriller film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. It stars Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier and features James Mason, Lilli Palmer, Uta Hagen and Steve Guttenberg in supporting roles. The screenplay by Heywood Gould is based on the novel of the same name by Ira Levin.
The film was produced by Martin Richards and Stanley O'Toole with Robert Fryer as executive producer. The music score was by Jerry Goldsmith and the cinematography by Henri Decaë. It was produced through Sir Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It was nominated for three Academy Awards.
The film was shot on location in Austria, England, Portugal, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was Schaffner's second sci-fi film, appearing ten years after Planet of the Apes.

Release Date: October 5, 1978


Distrib: 20th Century Fox

Boxoffice: $19,000,000 2013: #66,788,900