THE NAME ADOLF HITLER is synonymous with absolute evil, so much so that Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim once called him “an eruption of demonism into history.” The success of The Boys from Brazil depends upon the audience’s willingness to go along with this assessment—and enough of them did to make the film a box office hit when it reached theaters in 1978.
Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and adapted from author Ira Levin’s 1976 novel of the same takes place three decades after Hitler’s 1945 bunker suicide beneath the Nazi Chancellery. A “Comrades Organization,” a cabal of surviving SS officers based in South America, is intent upon creating a Fourth Reich. To do so, they must assassinate 94 middle-aged men—all of them minor civil servants—and these killings must fall within a day or two of certain dates. The assassins themselves are ignorant of the reasoning behind the scheme. Only those at the very top of the Comrades Organization know the true plan, and among them all, perhaps the only one who fully believes in it is Dr. Josef Mengele (played by Gregory Peck), notorious for his fiendish experiments on Auschwitz inmates. He seeks nothing less than to create a duplicate of Hitler, with the fanatical certainty that this Hitler will save the Aryan race in the latter years of the twentieth century.
