The Boys from Brazil Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

The Boys from Brazil Blu-ray Movie Review

Send in the clones.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 16, 2014

Ira Levin was a master of the so-called “high concept” before the term had ever been coined. Though Levin’s output as both novelist and playwright isn’t especially large, its impact on the pop cultural zeitgeist can hardly be understated. It’s instructive to note that even some titles of Levin’s oeuvre have become shorthand for various concepts—witness the visceral reactions and instant recognition mentioning tomes like Rosemary's Baby or The Stepford Wives can often entail. The Boys from Brazil is one of Levin’s most audacious formulations, one that, like Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives and even earlier Levin pieces like A Kiss Before Dying, deals at a baseline with the incursion of evil into seemingly mundane everyday life. In much the same way that Levin utilized actual history like the famous Time cover asking if God were dead in Rosemary’s Baby or the well publicized animatronic exploits of Disney “imagineers” in The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil plays on several key real life facts (and even personages) to craft its unsettling tale of a cadre of former Third Reich officers and hangers-on who have hatched an outlandish plot to create a Fourth Reich. The tale involves Dr. Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck), who when Levin’s original novel came out and even when the film premiered in 1978, was still alive and in hiding. A Simon Wiesenthal-esque “Nazi hunter” named Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier, Academy Award nominated for his performance) is trying to piece together a puzzle for which he has only sporadic and seemingly nonsensical clues. For anyone who already knows the “secret” of The Boys from Brazil, one can only marvel at Levin’s fecund imagination, while also appreciating the circuitous art of screenwriter Heywood Gould and director Franklin J. Schaffner at keeping the revelations at bay until appropriately shocking late denouements. For anyone who has yet to experience The Boys from Brazil, it’s probably best to skip right to the technical sections of the review before any further spoilers arise.

Part of The Boys from Brazil’s brilliance is how effortlessly it misdirects the audience, leaving them well in the dark as to what’s really going on for at least the first half hour or so of the film (and, really, well beyond that until the final revelations are unspooled some time later). The film opens in Paraguay where a young Jewish man named Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg, billed as Steven) has been tracking the activities of various former Third Reich members, all of whom see to be congregating for some unknown purpose. He reaches out via long distance telephone to Ezra Lieberman in Vienna. Lieberman is nonplussed by Kohler’s revelations of Nazis in South America, telling the kid that everyone knows there are Nazis in South America. He advises Kohler to give up his solitary and potentially dangerous hunt and get back to the United States where he’ll be safe. Kohler of course does not follow this advice and instead penetrates the fortress like mansion where the Nazis are holed up, hiding a microphone in a parlor and ultimately recording their meeting, which is helmed by the notorious Mengele.

Mengele begins to speak about a series of murders that need to happen over the coming couple of years or so, killings of seemingly nondescript elderly men who apparently have nothing in common. Even one of the former Nazi thugs enlisted to perform the murders is confused as to why this would help reconstitute the Reich, but the imperious Mengele informs the man that his is not to question why, but simply to follow orders. Kohler gets a lot of the meeting on (cassette!) tape, and hurriedly returns to his squalid hotel to phone Lieberman yet again, but in the meantime Mengele has been made aware of the microphone and all hell breaks loose.

Lieberman, while irked at having been awakened in the middle of the night, is able to glean enough information off of the tape that Kohler plays to be intrigued, especially after it’s obvious that something horrible has happened to Kohler during the phone call. Armed with only weird but tantalizing snippets of information, Lieberman calls an old debt due from a journalist (Denholm Elliott), telling the newsman he wants reports of any 65 year old civil servants who meet accidental deaths anywhere in the world. Lieberman entrusts some of the research to his sister Esther (Lilli Palmer) while using some of his rapidly diminishing funds to start visiting the homes of nearby families whose husbands and fathers have recently died under somewhat mysterious circumstances.

In the meantime the film has slyly hinted at Mengele’s nefarious scheme in a number of cutaways to the dastardly doctor’s South American jungle hideaway, where he’s regularly visited by a former Nazi officer named Eduard Siebert (James Mason). It’s obvious that the killings are part of a much larger plan, but what that plan is is only hinted at, at least in the early going. The fact that Mengele is obviously continuing his despicable genetic experiments on local natives is but one clue that The Boys from Brazil drops almost as a throwaway. The film perhaps makes one fatal misstep relatively early on when Lieberman visits the widow of a recently deceased civil servant and interacts with her obnoxious son (Jeremy Black), a kid whose appearance is not handled especially subtly.

The film continues to follow Lieberman, who is desperately trying to figure out exactly what’s going on, as well as Mengele and his henchmen, who by this point are barely a step ahead of their nemesis, attempting to continue their string of murders so that their grand plot might come to fruition. By the time the final clue is offered (to Lieberman and the audience simultaneously), Levin’s incredible sleight of hand and blending of fact and fiction has created a sinister world that is both unsettling but uncannily “real” feeling. A Kiss Before Dying’s film adaptation couldn’t quite muster the misdirection that is Levin’s stock in trade, but The Boys from Brazil does a mostly commendable job of keeping the secret hidden until the appropriate moment.

The Boys from Brazil offers somewhat unusual roles for both Olivier and (especially) Peck. Younger viewers may not know or recall Peck as a “bad boy” in the overcooked western Duel in the Sun, and seeing him as a suave but deadly scheming Nazi may be a bit of a shock for those with Atticus Finch firmly entrenched in their cinematic minds. Olivier is just the slightest bit schtick-laden in this film, playing some scenes for comedy (no doubt at the behest of Schaffner) that seem tonally at odds with the otherwise unsettling material. The supporting cast, which also includes the inimitable Uta Hagen as a former Nazi guard Lieberman had brought to justice, is outstanding.

The Boys from Brazil Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Boys from Brazil is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Shout! Factory with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Fans of Shout! and some of its imprints may know the label has struck a deal with ITV to release some of its catalog, and The Boys from Brazil is part of that haul. Though the British ITV Blu-ray is now several years old, a cursory comparison of the screenshots included with Svet Atanasov's review of that release seems to suggest this is either identical, or nearly identical. I'm perhaps slightly more pleased with the overall look of the transfer than Svet was. Elements are in surprisingly good shape, with hardly even minor issues to contend with. Colors are generally lustrous and nicely saturated, and as Svet pointed out, the grain field is natural and organic looking. There are slight discrepancies in clarity and grain structure, notably in a number of exterior shots toward the end of the film when Lieberman is tooling around in what looks like an old red Datsun. This retains the somewhat softer look of the film's theatrical exhibition, without any intrusive sharpening or filtering affecting the image.

The Boys from Brazil Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Boys from Brazil features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track that easily supports the film's dialogue and Jerry Goldsmith's playfully sinister (and Academy Award nominated) score. That said, the midrange here is not especially full sounding, perhaps depriving some of Goldsmith's snarly (and dare I say farty) brass cues of some of their inherent punch. But dialogue comes through just fine, despite the variance in accents the various actors employ. The track shows no signs of any damage nor any problems to cause concern.

The Boys from Brazil Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:44)

The Boys from Brazil Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Any film that has Sir Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck engaging in hand to hand combat while being threatened by Doberman Pinschers is unmissable in my not so humble opinion. But even without that admittedly hyperbolic climax, the film is a brisk and unsettling story that is simply more proof of what a unique and fascinating mind Ira Levin had. This Blu-ray offers solid technical merits and even without any significant supplements comes Highly recommended.