‘Have you ever felt superior to those around you?‘
Alas, dear reader, once again I have failed you. I sat down to watch The Boys from Brazil with the best of intentions. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond my control intervened. And by ‘beyond my control’ I mean that I had perhaps had a few too many stouts the night before and a fairly complex, hard sci-fi film about an insidious attempt to clone Adolf Hitler was perhaps not the correct choice of film given the circumstances…
…but I did persevere. And I was somewhat rewarded by a couple of great performances from Hollywood royalty in the shape of Lawrence Olivier and Gregory Peck (as a Nazi hunter and infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele respectively). Director Franklin J. Schaffner provides some gorgeous scenery, most pertinently an astonishing scene that takes place atop the the Kölnbrein Dam in Austria and utilises the location beautifully, and the, quite frankly, very disturbing conclusion caps off this adaptation of Ira Levin’s acclaimed novel in a way that left me quite emotionally bereft. It did not help me to recover. This is not an exit.
And that’s all I’ve got for you, I’m afraid. In many ways, it’s a miracle I managed to write this at all. Now. Let’s have a nice lie down, shall we?