On the Scottish band Simple Minds' early song "Boys from Brazil" Jim Kerr croons, "Not just the boy that's crying wolf now / Someone else is screaming up at our door" and while the lyrics are hard to parse they convey the uneasiness at the heart of Ira Levin's popular novel on which the song and the film are based. Speaking in interviews, Kerr mentioned that the novel lent itself well as a springboard for Kerr's growing concern about the threat of Neo-Nazi-ism in early '80s Britain. Kerr wasn't alone, for many people The Boys from Brazil (film and novel) struck a nervous chord.

While today few young people are familiar with Ira Levin's book, the subsequent Gregory Peck/Lawrence Olivier film, or even Simple Minds' initial output, in the late seventies/early eighties, The Boys from Brazil was something of a cultural touchstone despite its outrageous conceits. Like Ira Levin's other crowd pleasers (two of which were made into very successful films, Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives), the story skillfully combined the realistic (scientific advancement, political upheaval) with the fantastic (clones, Satanic cults) to paint a sinister picture of what really lurked behind the plastic facade of daily life. The novel was a bestseller, the film was nominated for three Academy Awards, and it all came at a time in American history when Nazis were still in the headlines. Nazis were the villains in popular films like Marathon Man and Voyage of the Damned, and the real Nazi doctor at the center of The Boys from Brazil was still alive and in hiding at the time of the film's 1978 release.

The film of The Boys from Brazil fits neatly in the paranoid thriller vein popularized by films like The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and The Parallax View (1974). Sir Laurence Olivier plays aging Nazi hunter Ezra Liberman (modeled on real life Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal) and the film follows his quest to track down the notorious Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele (Gregory Peck) who is hiding out in Paraguay and cloning Hitler from samples of DNA. The chase leads Liberman to one of these clones, a young boy stashed on a farm in Pennsylvania. But this is only one of the "boys from Brazil."

Playing an entirely unsympathetic character, Peck burns down his own charismatic aura in a malicious turn as Dr. Mengele. His portrayal is both frightening and hammy at the same time. As the Nazi hunter, Olivier is the backbone of the film and brings to his role a weightiness and dignity that belies the material's campier nature. Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) appears in one of the film's most memorable sequences explaining the cloning process in exquisite (and factual) detail. Director Franklin J. Schaffner of Planet of the Apes fame (he also made Patton and Papillion) provides authentic though rather artless direction, ensuring that the movie moves forward beat by beat and that the details of Mengele's plot (a twist difficult to keep in the bag these days, a la Soylent Green) remains shocking, if not surprising, despite repeated viewings.

While its impact has diminished over the years, The Boys from Brazil remains a thrilling sci fi/paranoia yarn with surprising performances and a "ripped from the headlines" topicality.