Trivia / The Boys from Brazil

• Acting for Two: The Boys cloned from Hitler are all played by the same actor.
• Awesome, Dear Boy:
  • Gregory Peck agreed to portray Mengele only because he had wanted to work with Laurence Olivier.
  • James Mason reportedly was not interested in the script for this movie, until he found out that his friends "Greg" and "Larry" were already signed-up.
• California Doubling:
  • Austria's Kölnbrein Dam doubled for the Swedish dam where an assassination sequence occurs. The dam was under construction at the time of principal photography, and was then not as yet a functioning dam.
  • Portugal doubled for Paraguay.
• Dyeing for Your Art: For his role as a notorious Nazi, Gregory Peck had his famous "widow's peak" hairline shaved off, his eyebrows cropped, put on a little Hitler mustache, dyed his hair with black shoe polish, and then had added white face paint make-up. Publicity for this movie stated that Peck bore an uncanny resemblance to photographs of the real Dr. Josef Mengele, which had, at the time, been recently smuggled out of South America.
• Fake Nationality: Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier and James Mason as Germans. And American Jeremy Black as all the Hitler-as-a-boy clones.
• The Other Marty: Gregory Peck replaced George C. Scott, who pulled out before principal photography began.
• Playing Against Type: Gregory Peck, best known for playing the saintly Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, not only plays a straight-up Nazi but arguably the most infamous Nazi outside of Hitler himself.
  • The same can also be said for Laurence Olivier. Only two years after his Oscar-nominated performance as Christian "Is it...Safe?" Szell in Marathon Man, and famously torturing Dustin Hoffman, Olivier plays the aged, and weak, but determined, Nazi HUNTER Ezra Lieberman, hunting Mengele in this film. Making this even more ironic is the fact that Szell in the prior film was actually based off of Mengele himself, so Olivier goes from playing an Expy of Mengele to the polar opposite character of a Nazi hunter out to stop him in the span of only two years.

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