I think that I would have liked The Boys from Brazil more if I had NOT seen it after The German Doctor because I do love 70s thrillers, especially films like The House on Garibaldi Street and 21 Hours at Munich rooted in a historical moral framework. The Boys from Brazil and The German Doctor are polar opposites: the first is bombastic, thrilling and expansive whereas the second is understated, intimate and elegant.
Both films imagine what Dr. Mengele did after he escaped justice and how he furthered his Nazi agenda, but The German Doctor seems more realistic, plausible and chilling whereas The Boys from Brazil seems like The Island of Dr. Moreau meets Rosemary’s Baby, but instead of demons, you have Nazis conspiring to produce a historical anti-Christ. The Boys from Brazil should be similar to Rosemary’s Baby because both are based on Ira Levin ‘s books. Levin seems to be obsessed with conspiracies involving evil invading families.
I think that I could not suspend disbelief because The Boys from Brazil mistakenly cast Gregory Peck as Dr. Mengele. Just, no. The German accent is cringe worthy. He wears a white tuxedo. His Dr. Mengele feels more like a Bond villain from the Roger Moore era than a Nazi doctor.
I do think that The Boys from Brazil was otherwise on the right track. I would love to know if The Boys from Brazil was a conscious homage to Simon Wiesenthal and what Wiesenthal thought of Laurence Olivier’s heroic role as the elderly Nazi hunter. The Boys from Brazil’s casting director was pretty bold to cast Olivier after he played a Nazi dentist in Marathon Man, who was also modeled after Dr. Mengele, but it worked.
I think that what makes these 70s thrillers like The Boys from Brazil appealing is the clear narrative that exploits the psychological legacy of WWII anxiety that we must guard against anti-Semitism to insure that future Jewish people are not victimized, and that Nazis legitimately pose a violent threat. How is it possible that a group of people who were responsible for negatively changing the world in a systematic and violent way just stopped because WWII ended? These 70s thrillers all seem to suggest that not only did they not stop, but introduce the threat by showing the Nazis still killing Jewish people and others then get stopped by Jewish heroes before it is too late. The Boys from Brazil shows us our deepest fears then reassures us that it will not happen again because Nazis unintentionally created an eternally vigilant, historically aware enemy, the Jewish Nazi Hunter, whom we still see today in Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain, which appears to be a vampiric homage to The Boys from Brazil.