starring Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, James Mason
directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
125 minutes
Barry Kohler, an American investigator, more than 30 years after the end of World War 2, finds a bunch of Nazis including Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) in Paraguay. He contacts Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier), the Nazi Hunter, but the Nazis kill Kohler before he can pass along everything he has found.
Lieberman investigates and discovers that the Nazis have ordered the deaths of 94 men, all the same age. in various countries in North American and western Europe. Lieberman was reluctant to help Kohler when he was alive but after Kohler disappears he feels obligated to do something.
I've been meaning to see this movie for years. I saw a very little bit of the beginning of the movie back in the 1980s when it was shown on TV. I remember two things from the commercials for it. First, there was a scene where a man fell from a great height. Second, there was a scene with Doberman Pinschers.
I knew that the plot had something to do with cloning Adolph Hitler but that was about it.
Steve Guttenberg played the part of Barry Kohler. He is probably best known to me for the Police Academy series of films but I also recall seeing him in Cocoon and Three Men and a Baby.
Laurence Olivier was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor but did not win. It was the ninth and final time he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. The following year he was given a lifetime achievement Academy Award. I don't think that I have seen any of the other movies for which he was nominated.
The film was also nominated for Academy Awards for Film Editing and Original Music Score but did not win in either of those categories.
This is not a good movie. It is ponderous. It really takes its time getting to the end. The German accents used by Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier were very thick and didn't really add to the movie. James Mason also played a German but unlike Peck and Olivier he did not speak with a German accent. There were plot threads that seemed to go nowhere or ended abruptly. I think that there was potential here but the finished product comes up short.
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