Review – The Boys from Brazil

The concept of this movie is intriguing in a tabloid sort of way: Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) is generating clones of Hitler from a secret lab in Brazil. They’re being raised by couples with personalities akin to Der Fuhrer’s actual parents in the hope that the right combination of nature and nurture would produce a squad of potential dictators. Laurence Olivier plays a Simon Wiesenthal-like character who learns of the plot and tries to thwart it. Despite a fair amount of overacting, for the most part the drama works. It even manages to eke out an occasional chill, particularly in the brief shots showing Mengele’s hobby of making blue-eyed “Aryans” out of South American children. Mildly amusing