(innocent reader on their knees): No, please! I promise I'll do anything! Just don't do this!
(me): I have no choice! I have to! I must!
(innocent reader): If I read another book/movie review/comparison, I'll die a horrible death!
(me): If you use 2 slashes again in one sentence, I'll kill you myself...AFTER you read!
OK, OK, a little extreme, but these review/comparisons get stale at the beginning sometimes! Well, some exciting news first... I have discovered an author this year that I had never read previously: Ira Levin! I saw a hardcover first edition of The Stepford Wives last Spring at a small antique store for a reasonable price and had to get it. Not only that, I actually dared to open it and (gasp) READ it!
Levin is actually an easy author to read, and Stepford was a quickie. Later in the year as I was preparing to take my mom across the country, my wife got me The Boys From Brazil. It was intended to be read a bit throughout the trip when we stopped for the night, but I only got a few pages in on the plane ride back from North Carolina. I just recently picked it up again during my Christmas holiday and sure enough, I got through it in a few days, finishing it on Christmas in fact.
What is this one about? Simply, Nazis! Specifically, it is about a complicated plot by Joseph Mengele, having been forced into the jungles of Brazil, to clone a whole new generation of Adolph Hitlers via tissue samples left to him ceremoniously by Hitler himself. After the fertilization and insertion into Brazilian women, the successful births are then put up for adoption for just the right types of families in Europe and America...the right types being a tyrannical father and loving mother of specific ages.
When the fathers are at about 65 years of age, Mengele sends out a hit squad of devoted Aryans to kill them. The reason? Hitler's dad died at that age. It is all a carefully concocted plan to mirror Hitler's teen years so one or more of them can be a nation's new fuhrer. In fact, this is so detailed that the book really is a bit of science fiction, a combo of cloning basics and psychological conditioning.
To balance this out, there is detective work involved on behalf of a former Nazi hunter named Yakov Liebermann who gets a tip from a spy at Mengele's briefing at a Japanese restaurant in Brazil at the book's start on some of the names of those to be assassinated. Yakov hears only a bit before Mengele and a hit squad kill the spy in his hotel room, but moves on it with his limited resources due to financial and organizational troubles.
Yakov meets with the wife of one of the victims and meets her son, thinking nothing of it. However, when he interviews another victim's wife and meets her son, he is shocked to see the exactitude of this boy to the first one, right down to the blue eyes! After consulting a biology professor and the imprisoned Nazi woman who handled the illegal adoptions, along with the list the spy gave him, he pieces together the intricate puzzle. At first he is confused because Mengele has brown eyes, then he realizes who the boys will become, as well as pieces together who the next victim will be.
Meanwhile, Mengele's Nazi backers are growing nervous when they hear of Liebermann's snooping and call back the assassins. Mengele is furious and decides to handle the killings himself, as well as take care of Liebermann once and for all. In fact, Ira Levin makes Mengele a master of disguise, almost like Artemus Gordon from The Wild Wild West. Through trickery, he gets Liebermann's location and target: the Wheelock family near Lancaster, PA. Mengele meets Mr. Wheelock who has a menacing team of Dobermans, and says he is Liebermann. He convinces Wheelock to put the dogs away, then assassinates him on the basement stairs.
Liebermann arrives and Mengele tries to Americanize his voice, but Liebermann sees through it and the two engage in a struggle, with Liebermann badly injured by gunshots, but not before he releases the dogs. The teen Bobby Wheelock arrives and calls off the dogs tentatively. Mengele tries to persuade the boy of his mission and their identities and paint Liebermann as the villain. Luckily, Bobby doesn't buy it and has the dogs kill Mengele with a command of "Mustard"(kill). Incidentally, "ketchup: told the dogs to be calm and "pickles" put them on close menacing guard. Bobby agrees to call for medical help if Liebermann stays quiet about Bobby ordering the dogs to kill. Liebermann and the young Hitler shake on it...a dark irony considering Liebermann's life.
At the end, the Jewish Defense League is happy Mengele is dead, but want Liebermann's list of names so they can kill all the boys as a precaution. Liebermann refuses and flushes the list down the toilet, opting to let the boys grow on their own and assume world conditions won't bring a new Hitler forward to take control.
Like Stepford Wives, Boys From Brazil is more or less satirical (the former was more satirical) in nature. Nazi Germany was only in power just over 30 years before Levin published the book in 1976, so surviving "Lost Generation" and older Baby Boomers were well informed on the second world war and the Holocaust. Other post-war Nazi stories were published in the 1970s as well, so Levin was well-versed on facts to create this satire, as much as he had some insight on Women's Lib to write Stepford. I liked the way the story unfolded, with the plot thickener of the cloning coming about mid-book. Nothing felt too rushed or too slow, and the coming showdown between Liebermann and Mengele had me reading almost the entire second half in one night!
One nice thing about the 1970s was that film adaptations of books generally came within a year or two of the book's publication, since George Lucas-style special effects had not yet revolutionized the film industry. The book was published in 1976 and the movie was released in 1978. Gregory Peck played Mengele and Sir Laurence Olivier played Liebermann, though his first name was changed to Ezra for some odd reason. Also, the Nazis were working out of Paraguay, so the title makes no sense at all. Apart from that, the movie is pretty faithful to the book overall.
What got me laughing was the fight near the end between Peck and Olivier...Peck was 62 and Olivier was 71, so it was like watching Grumpy Old Men in a darker version! Also, there is a drawback to being too faithful to a book at times, though Levin's writing makes adaptation pretty easy.
In conclusion, if you're into Nazi lore at all merely as a subject of history, this book is quite an entertaining bit of fantasy and sci-fi, even though the very end of the book shows one of the clones having an artful vision of a man giving a great speech to a crowd, an ironic but expected foreshadowing after Liebermann flushed the list in a show of good faith. As to book vs movie, take the book, which I usually recommend anyway.
Hopefully I did not harm any eyes in the writing of this blog.
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