ABSTRACT
In the long, post-Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977, US) slump in American movie ambition (on the level of narrative if not whizz-bang technology), Pauline Kael's reviews for The New Yorker came to rely increasingly on lavish assessments of performers' approaches to inadequate material to maintain her customary creative zest. Kael's contrasting depictions of Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier struggling to stay afloat in The Boys From Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978, UK/US) reveals her matchless ability to make film performances, even thunderously maladroit ones, achieve entrancing life on the page.
When American actors are cast too strongly against type, they look ridiculous. Who could accept John Wayne or James Stewart – or Gregory Peck – as a Nazi sadist? Peck strides into The Boys From Brazil with stiff black hair, beady little eyes (one squintier than the other), a chalky complexion, and a thin mustache that seems to be coming out of his nose, and when he speaks in an arch-villain sibilant German accent you can't keep from laughing. In this large-scale version of Ira Levin's 1976 novel, he plays the monstrous geneticist Dr. Josef Mengele, who in his jungle hideaway is still carrying on the experiments he began in the death camps, staring into the future as he walks unconcernedly among the zombie mutants he has created. Charles Laughton was genuinely clammy and terrifying when he did this mad-genius-among-hismutants number in 1932, in Island of Lost Souls, but Peck hasn't it in him to inspire genuine terror. His effects are all on the surface, and he looks particularly bad because he's playing opposite Laurence Olivier, who is the aged hero, Ezra Lieberman, a famous Nazi-hunter (and a fictional counterpart of Simon Wiesenthal). Olivier does a mischievous impersonation of aged, hammy actors, such as the late Albert Basserman and Felix Bressart, with their querulous whiny voices and their fussiness – their way of seeming almost helpless yet 88resourceful, sagacious, and totally good. He takes off on this cloying humanistic style just enough to be very funny; if an actor to whom this falsetto came more naturally had played the role, Lieberman would probably have been as tiresome as the other characters in the movie take him to be. Only Olivier, with his daring flirtatiousness, could make this old bore enchanting. In the prison sequence, when he sits across a table from a convicted war criminal (Uta Hagen) and must control the loathing that makes the encounter physically painful to him, and later, at the end of a discussion about cloning with a scientist (Bruno Ganz), when he realizes what the ninety-four ‘boys from Brazil’ are, he rises above his Viennese singsongy charm. He demonstrates that the harmless-old-bore act of the aged can be a way of saving oneself for the things that count.
(Kael 1980: 451–52)