Film: 'The Boys From Brazil' directed by Franklin J. Schaffner

Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck, James Mason
Franklin J. Schaffner

There's a certain exoticism in thoughts of South America - a place of motorcycle road trips, drug dens and war criminals on the run. The latter is the basis of The Boys from Brazil, a 1978 film that tried to wedge its way into that decade's paranoid thriller sub-genre, only to fail and find an audience years later for its other qualities.

Dr Josef Mengele (played by Gregory Peck) is alive and well, holding secret Third Reich meetings in South America. Nazi hunter Ezra Liebermann (Laurence Olivier) is soon on his case, eventually stumbling upon a Brazilian medical lab where the evil doctor is killing off civil servants in a cunning, convoluted plan to bring back Adolf Hitler through not one but 94 perfect clones.

Absurd as it may sound, The Boys from Brazil has a lot going for it: adapted from the book by Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby), directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton) and featuring a cast of theatrically trained actors. And while the sum of its parts only adds up to exploitation, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The film takes a then seemingly advanced - now hokey - concept and plays it straight. At the time, you could see their reasoning: Schaffner had already taken the absurd idea of talking monkeys and made it into the classic Planet of the Apes, so how could little Hitlers be any more of a stretch? But it isn't so much the cloning as everything that happens in between that makes it so entertaining in retrospect.

How is it that Liebermann chances upon every clue in the case through sheer luck? How can the Nazis so blatantly murder those civil servants and still convince the police that they're merely accidents? And how did they get Peck and Olivier to act like that?