orld War II may be over and the Nazis may be in the global backwaters of South America, but some of those Putsch-happy senior citizens of the Third Reich are not quite resigned to the idea of retirement. But, in the overall siesta-like quiescence of the Fatherland's dispossessed, no one really notices. Except one man, a young Jewish man, who has been secretly monitoring the activities of these energetic, expatriate fascists.
He is inspired by the work of Ezra Lieberman, a venerable, Jewish Nazi-hunter. But Lieberman, like most of the Nazis he's hunted, has grown old and soft, and knows the modern age is more concerned with contemporary, fashionable evil than that of three decades ago. When the young Jewish crusader tries to alert Lieberman that something truly nefarious is afoot, Lieberman dismisses it out of hand. "You called me to tell me Josef Mengele is in Paraguay? You know this. I know this. My sister's tailor knows this..."
When Lieberman loses contact with the crusader, he suspects foul play. With a paltry array of seemingly irrelevant clues, Lieberman slowly learns that in his post-war years Mengele has done a lot more than learn how to pronounce "lederhosen" in Spanish. In fact, the sadist-scientist, infamous for his biological experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, has been busy with a hideous new enterprise. And upon the outcome of this bizarre experiment, the fate of the free world may hang...
The seeds of evil can grow in all of us
This is a type of SF film that hardly ever gets made. It has an excellent cast, a good plot, and much human-scale suspense. And director Franklin Schaffner shows great restraint considering that, through the years, Nazism has been transformed from a grubby, ugly, human evil to a grandiose, almost cosmic evil. For the most part, the Nazis of this film are the miserable and nasty people they truly are, not media-hyped monsters.
In fact, almost everything about the film is low-key, and the film is better for it: Gregory Peck (Mengele) and Laurence Olivier (Lieberman) articulate good, understated performances. The plot encompasses the arch-nemesis dynamic of the rivals, but, smartly, is not defined by it. The climax sees two old men scratching, pulling, and biting one another--knuckle-shattering punches thankfully absent. All of this normalcy makes the fantastic scientific premise of Mengele's experiment a bit easier to consider.
Because the premise of the film hinges upon the credibility of its science, flaws develop whenever specificity is chosen over generality. To see the hapless South American natives of Mengele's jungle-based torture lab is chilling, because history knows the truth of Auschwitz. But to see a close-up of any of them with icy-blue Nordic eyes is a bit silly.
But mostly Schaffner's touch is deft, and the best thing that the film does is subtly suggest that evil can be grown from seeds in all of us. The Nazis weren't bogeymen, they were just men. And women. Because humanity as a whole has an equal capacity for cruelty as well as beneficence, their work continues.
