The Boys from Brazil
Short description
Set years after the Second World War, The Boys from Brazil follows Ezra Lieberman, a veteran Nazi hunter who learns of a conspiracy involving Josef Mengele, the former camp doctor now living in South America. Mengele has recruited young neo-Nazis for a plan built on cloning: he intends to produce many copies of Adolf Hitler and place them with families around the world, raising them under conditions meant to reproduce the Führer's upbringing. Lieberman, initially sceptical, begins tracing the people connected to the scheme and finds himself confronting Mengele directly as the plot moves toward its goal. The film is a thriller adapted from Ira Levin's novel.
Franklin J. Schaffner directed, working from a screenplay by Heywood Gould. It was the seventh film he directed, arriving between Papillon and Lionheart. Gregory Peck plays Mengele and Laurence Olivier plays Lieberman, with James Mason, Lilli Palmer, Uta Hagen and Steve Guttenberg among the credited cast of 33.
Produced by Martin Richards and Stanley O'Toole for 20th Century Fox, The Producer Circle Co. and ITC Entertainment, the film had a budget of 12 million USD and took 19 million USD worldwide. On IMDb it holds a 6.7 rating from 466 votes, while the film critics' rating stands at 6.3 from 32 reviews, placing the two measures fairly close together.
What's left behind the scenes
- He did his makeup and hairstyle for the role of Gregory Peck (1916-2003) in such a way that he was called an exact copy of Dr. Josef Mengele (1911-1979), whose photographs had been secretly smuggled out of South America at the time.
- The film's plot ends in 1979, shortly after the death of Josef Mengele. When filming ended, Mengele was still living in São Paulo (Brazil). Remarkably, the filmmakers managed to predict the month of the Nazi criminal's death. He died at the age of 67 on February 7, 1979, four months after the film's release. Mengele drowned in the ocean while swimming after suffering a stroke. The famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005), who served as the prototype for the character played by Sir Laurence Olivier, continued the search for Mengele for several more years. In 1985, German authorities tracked down Mengele's friends in Brazil, and then his grave, where he was buried under an assumed name. Mengele's remains were exhumed, and in 1992 it was definitively established that the grave contained him.
Similar movies
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
