Monday, January 20, 2020

The Boys From Brazil



I saw this movie back in the '70's and it seems like it was taken seriously at the time. Based on the Ira Levin novel.

It's been pointed out that Josef Mengele was alive when the movie was made. It was rather flattering to him, presenting him as a genius who came up with the idea of cloning Hitler in the 1940's and leading a group of Nazis in South America.

Lawrence Olivier stars as a Simon Wiesenthal-like Nazi-hunter. Gregory Peck as Mengele. Introducing Jeremy Black playing multiple roles as horrible, obnoxious tween Hitler clones.

Jeremy Black was a stage actor. I don't know why he didn't do any more movies. Was he typecast as Hitler's clone?

Mengele and other surviving Nazis have produced a number of Hitler clones. They adopt them out to families that are similar to Hitler's, to families where the father is significantly older than the mother, for one thing. Hitler's father apparently died when he was twelve, so the Nazis start murdering the adoptive fathers as the clones turn twelve.

At the end, tween clone Hitler seems more on the ball than most tweens would under the circumstances, but he's still a little Hitler.

The movie seems to take the view that Hitler's problem was that he was spoiled by his over-the-hill father who was so happy that he finally got to adopt a child at his age.

Christopher Hitchens once pointed out that Hitler never had a real job until he became fuhrer. Could a homeless unemployed postcard artist become leader of a country today?  There was a US general who gave a speech to the troops enthusing over Bush in Hitler-like terms. He said that God must have sent him to lead the country because he came out of nowhere, he became president even though he had never really done anything and he didn't even win the election (he was serious).

For that matter, I don't know what Obama ever did for a living and Trump-Hitler parallels go without saying.

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