The Boys from Brazil
A Simon Wiesenthal Center operative finds something big. All around the world.
A 1976 novel by Ira Levin, it was adapted into a 1978 film starring Laurence Olivier as Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman and Gregory Peck as Dr Josef Mengele.
The novel and film are a speculative fiction type story involving infamous Nazi scientist Mengele (known as the "Angel of Death" for the extent of death he inflicted upon his victims during the Holocaust) trying to resurrect the Third Reich by cloning Hitler and recreating the events of his youth in order to make sure his Hitler Clones become as much like the original as possible.
Unfortunately for him, Mengele has a group of devoted Nazi hunters on his trail...
Tropes featured in this work include:
- Acting for Two: The Boys
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Villainous example, as Mengele's superiors torch his base and kill his men.
- Angry Guard Dog: Killing the son of a doberman breeder proves to be bad for Mengele.
- Apocalypse Hitler
- Cassandra Truth: Mengele tells one of the Hitler clones his true origins. It fails.
- Children Are Innocent: Lieberman doesn't want to go after the kids after Mengele dies because he believes in this. The ending kinda implies otherwise.
- Cloning Gambit: Played with: It's not actually Hitler Back From the Dead, just clones of him.
- Decoy Protagonist: Barry in the movie.
- The End or Is It: in the ending, one of the Hitler clones gets really absorbed and excited about his pictures of Mengele's dead body...
- Expendable Clone: Averted. While Mengele's superiors want the project scrapped, Mengele's very aware that his clones are aging in real time, and that each is irreplaceable.
- Evil Detecting Dog
- Failure Hero
- Gone Horribly Right: Mengele's plan to create a new Hitler leads to the following trope:
- Hoist By His Own Petard: Mengele
- Hunting Accident: One of the parents murder.
- History Marches On: The movie puts Mengele in Paraguay (though the mothers of the kids are Brazilian), his speculated real life location. He truly went there for sometime, but in the 1970s he was really in Brazil (where he died in 1979, meaning that besides the deteriorated health he could have seen the movie).
- Historical Villain Upgrade: Josef Mengele goes from, essentially, a psychotic State-sponsored Serial Killer who was, in reality, a totally incompetent scientist; to the Diabolical Mastermind behind both a cloning project at least a century ahead of its time, and an elaborate political scheme to recreate the Fourth Reich.
- Adolf Hitler, too, in the sense that merely creating a clone of him (and raising him in a near-identical way) is enough to potentially bring about The End of the World As We Know It. If nothing else, he is dreaded enough that everyone fears this outcome. Social, political, economic factors and everything else be damned!
- Yep, after all it isn't like the world changed between 1889 (Hitler's birth)and the 1970s! *rolls eyes*
- Adolf Hitler, too, in the sense that merely creating a clone of him (and raising him in a near-identical way) is enough to potentially bring about The End of the World As We Know It. If nothing else, he is dreaded enough that everyone fears this outcome. Social, political, economic factors and everything else be damned!
- Large Ham: Both protagonists are enjoying their roles, particularly Peck.
- Make It Look Like an Accident
- Nazi Brazil
- Nazi Hunter
- ~Ooh Me Accent's Slipping~: James Mason has a truly fake attempt at a German accent.
- One Hit Wonder: Jeremy Black, who played the titular kids, never had another film role, although he still had a career as a stage actor.
- Playing Against Type: Gregory Peck is the bad guy here.
- Posthumous Character:
- Adolf Hitler. Yeah he's dead, but he still affects every damn thing that happens in this story.
- Mannerisms and general demeanor aside, we learn more about Barry after he's killed than we knew about him when he was alive.
- Secondary Character Title
- Society Marches On: The description of cloning is painstakingly detailed, as the concept was relegated to more futuristic scifi at the movie's release.
- Stating the Simple Solution: Mengele asks his superiors why he can't "just shoot him", only to be denied...
- Xanatos Gambit: Lots of backups
- You Cloned Hitler
- You Killed My Father: The Nazis plan is to kill the boys' fathers to replicate Hitler's origin story. But one of them, after knowing Mengele killed his old man, sends the dogs to attack him.