Cloning Around

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner Screenplay by Heywood Gould

What a peculiar order Josef Mengele, the evil Nazi scientist, gives to the aging party goons he has assembled in the great house in Paraguay: Kill 94 men, all of them petty civil servants scattered around the world, and kill them on or near their 65th birthdays as they occur over the next 2 1/2 years. Still, true to their code, the Nazis obey his command unquestioningly.

At first Ezra Lieberman, who has devoted his life to hunting down war criminals, pays small heed to news of this meeting. But when his informant, a young Jewish activist, is killed, he senses the gathering of some fresh evil on the part of his old enemies and begins investigating the case, an enterprise that takes him to many odd corners of the world and leads him--several plodding steps behind the audience--to the remarkable conclusion that somehow Mengele has succeeded where the rest of science has so far failed: he has cloned a man. And not just any old human being, but his hero, Adolf Hitler.

And what, you may well ask, has the death of these 94 elderly gentlemen to do with this most dubious of achievements? Well, the 94 are, unwittingly, the adoptive fathers of 94 perfect little replicas of der Fuehrer, and now it is necessary, if you are to give the final nasty twist to their personalities, to replicate the great shaping experience of Hitler's adolescence--the death of the domineering father at age 65. A fairish number of "parents" are disposed of before Lieberman finally catches up with and confronts the wicked Mengele in a Pennsylvania farmhouse.

It is all pretty silly stuff, but the chief peculiarity of this film, based on Ira Levin's bestseller, is the expensive sobriety with which it has been mounted. Director Schaffner seems determined to overwhelm our disbelief with production values--a strategy that frequently threatens to succeed. To begin with, there is the fascination of watching Gregory Peck, Mr. Integrity himself, playing Mengele. He sports a nasty little mustache and a stiff posture, and seems to be enjoying his change of face and pace. But no more than Laurence Olivier, no less, relishes playing the old Jew. Wise and crusty, frail of frame but stout of heart, Lieberman is one of those movie character roles that the great actor visibly enjoys doing and that one cannot help enjoying along with him.

For the rest, the producers have scoured the world for authentic locations, and Schaffner has shot the hell out of them; he seems to like using mirrors to enhance his imagery. One particularly admires Mengele's experimental station, which is up some jungle river in South America. It's a minor triumph of art direction.

Yet in the end the self-conscious importance of the film produces a rather queasy feeling, for really this story is no more than a crude exploitation -- decked out with our latest scientific finery -- of what amounts to a penny dreadful fantasy. If you stop and think about it, even if there were a nest of Nazis hiding out in South America, most of them would be pushing 80 by now, and quite incapable of the exertions required by this farflung, not to mention farfetched plot. You can't escape the thought that the largest danger they present these days lies not in the real world, but in the movie world. They are almost the last incontrovertibly evil figures left to tempt film producers, the last people we can all agree to hate.

But films like this -- and Marathon Man a couple of years ago -- detach the Nazis from the historical wickedness that their kind committed and that we do well to bear in mind, and make them into faintly risible characters, just a step or two away from Mel Brooks creations. No amount of fancy framing can finally distract us from this unfortunate and diminuating effect.

Richard Schickel

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