What has Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, James Mason, and 92 Hitlers?
The Boys From Brazil!
In a lot of ways, Ira Levin was the Dan Brown of the 60s and 70s.
What if all the seemingly perfect wives in a seemingly perfect suburban community were really robots?).
He was a master of the outrageous storyline and the twist ending.
Problem was, he was an absolutely miserable writer.
Were talking just plain bone awful here.
What the fuck does that even mean?
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But then there were films likeThe Boys From Brazil.
and What if someone cloned Hitler?
I brought up the Einstein argument and he dismissed it, insisting you couldnt clone genius.
Less than a minute later he came right back at me with the Hitler argument.
So I guess you cant clone genius, but it’s possible for you to clone evil.
Or something like that.
I didnt push him on that one, figuring there was no point.
In 1976 he published another clunky bestseller with Hollywood written all over it.
As a movie, it was a sure thing.
So in came Franklin J. Schaffner to direct, and you couldnt hope for much better than that.
And admittedly, things do get pretty goofy here.
Hes clearly having an awful lot of fun playing a bad guy in a nutty picture.
If the others had followed his lead, well, this might have been a very different picture.
Or maybe theyre all just pretending theyre in another picture.
But well let it slide.
Oh, and they need to be white too, but maybe that goes without saying.
To hedge his bets, he disperses 92 clones across Europe and the States.
His civil servant father, for instance, died at age 65.
So there you go, a wave of seemingly unconnected assassinations of 65 year-old civil servants.
By the time the film begins, all this is well underway.
I mean exactly, right down to the freckles and the pale blue eyes.
Damned kids even comb their hair the same way (LIKE HITLER, EZRA!
LIKE HITLER!).
Not only that, but theyre all rude, arrogant little bastards who could use a good smacking around.
A word about the clones here.
And Im not going to harp on the bad science.
Ill accept that all the little Hitlers weighed the same and had the same complexion and the same accent.
But that hair business always nagged at me.
Schaffner in simple technical terms is a solid filmmaker and an excellent storyteller.
But still, hoo-boy…its like Levin ran with the What if someone cloned Hitler?
question, but never really thought it through too far.
If you start to scrutinize the plot at all, things start crumbling pretty quickly.
Jerry Goldsmiths score was nominated too, but hes always nominated.
Peck wasnt nominated for some reason, and Olivier didnt win.
I guess that one never got off the ground.
