Word: hitler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...IDEA FOR Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil is potentially no more idiotic than those which have fueled many successful Hollywood thrillers. A nasty Nazi doctor clones 94 infants from a graft of Hitler's skin, and plants his babies all over the world, trusting that in the correct environment at least a quarter of them will grow up to be fuhrers. It might have worked as satire of Hollywood, because these Nazis think like producers and studio-heads: Why bother to devise something new when cloning the old formula makes for a smashing success...
...what you will against Hitler, but he could have taught producer Lew Grade and director Franklin J. Schaffner a thing or two about captivating an audience. He would have told them that manipulation requires careful pacing, a dash of wit, and a lot of fervor. You've got to work and keep working, he would have said--you can't be sluggish or cowardly. It's all right to be simplistic and to prey upon people's most basic fears and desires, and it helps to be as perverse and merciless as possible, but you've got to have charisma...
...author began his story with what he calls a "prologue," The Winds of War, an 885-page novel published in 1971. In that book the action was carried on the square shoulders of a Navy career officer named Victor ("Pug") Henry, whose pre-Pearl Harbor experiences swept him through Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia and Churchill's Britain before the U.S. joined...
...many odd corners of the world and leads him-several plodding steps behind the audience-to the remarkable conclusion that somehow Mengele has succeeded where the rest of science has so far failed: he has cloned a man. And not just any old human being, but his hero, Adolf Hitler...
...with this most dubious of achievements? Well, the 94 are, unwittingly, the adoptive fathers of 94 perfect little replicas of der Führer, and now it is necessary, if you are to give the final nasty twist to their personalities, to replicate the great shaping experience of Hitler's adolescence-the death of the domineering father at age 65. A fairish number of "parents" are disposed of before Lieberman finally catches up with and confronts the wicked Mengele in a Pennsylvania farmhouse...