Review of The Boys from Brazil

"The Boys from Brazil" (1978 - 123 minutes) is an intriguing and a present-day thriller about human cloning directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, based on the Ira Levin's book. Twenty years before the birth of the sheep Dolly, the actor Gregory Peck plays the doctor Josef Mengele, Nazi who lived refugee between Brazil and Paraguay carrying out genetic experiences. The story begins when 65 years old men started to die in various countries. A famous and obstinate Nazi hunter, Ezra Lieberman (the actor Laurence Olivier), is alerted to the fact by a young American investigator and starts an investigation that will decipher a mysterious conspiracy. 94 clones of Adolf Hitler had been created and sent to families who had the same characteristics of the Nazi dictator family: parents profession, father who dies at the age of 65 years old, only son. The film shows an insane Mengele in his house in the Amazon Forest where, with the help of other survivors of the Third Reich, he commands a tenebrous project that was initiated when clones of Hitler were made from preserved sanguine cells. A scene that deserves prominence is the one where the scientist Professor Bruckner (the actor Bruno Ganz) shows how is the laboratory development of all the cloning process. The Professor stands out that "it is not enough the cloning of an individual to turn him into a Mozart or a Picasso, the environmental background also must be reproduced". The unquestionable and irremediable advance of the biological sciences, particularly the genetic engineering, turns out perfectly viable today what was before considered mere science fiction.