The Boys From Brazil  ★★★★

SCREEN veterans Gregory Peck and Lawrence Olivier have a great time with their roles in The Boys From Brazil.

This 1978 thriller is based on a novel by Ira Levin which considered a premise that would have been totally unbelievable at that time.

More than four decades later the idea that an exact copy of another person could be made is a little less fanciful.

Peck, who had generally played the good guy up to that time, took the role of Josef Mengele, one of the most reviled men in modern history who helped oversee the deaths of thousands at the hands of Germany’s Third Reich.

Mengele is particularly known for conducting human experiments on many of the vulnerable victims.

Levin, a celebrated novelist who also wrote Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, took the facts to a fictional extreme with his story set three decades after the Second World War.

Mengele has been living in Paraguay planning a Fourth Reich by creating a new Hitler.

His version of a Frankenstein monster will come from one of 94 teenage boys adopted by families in a dozen countries around the world.

The babies all have Hitler’s DNA, courtesy of blood and skin samples taken by Mengele while his leader was still alive.

But Mengele’s plan also involves increasing the odds of success by replicating Hitler’s social circumstances and upbringing. This includes carefully choosing the adopting parents and ensuring the father dies when the child is 14.

Olivier, one of the world’s greatest stage actors, plays Ezra Lieberman, a fictional Nazi hunter no doubt modelled to an extent on the real Simon Wiesenthal.

Interestingly, Olivier would flip this casting and also go on to play a former Nazi in the thriller Marathon Man released the same year.

The Boys From Brazil is a terrific story and brought to the screen by director Franklin J Schaffer (Planet of the Apes, Papilion, Patton) with precision and expert pacing.

There isn’t a moment wasted in propelling the story to its intense climax featuring a vicious tooth and nail fight between the two bitter, elderly foes.

Another veteran, James Mason, also enjoys himself as a colleague of Mengele, while Bruno Ganz (who went on to play Hitler in Downfall), Denholm Elliott and a young Steve Guttenberg feature in small but important roles.

This is a hidden gem that will continue to stand the test of time.