It stars Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier, and features James Mason, Lilli Palmer, Uta Hagen, Anne Meara, Denholm Elliott, and Steve Guttenberg in supporting roles.

At this meeting Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz doctor, issues instructions for the assassinations of 94 civil servants in Northern Europe and North America, all of them low-ranking and aged around 65, on particular dates over the next two years.

With the help of his sister Esther, British journalist Sidney Beynon and Jewish-American vigilante leader David Bennett, Lieberman begins investigating the deaths of civil servants fitting the profile who die suddenly over the next few months.

The doctor also shoots Lieberman, badly wounding him, but is then attacked and cornered by the family's vicious Doberman Pinschers (Mengele fears dogs).

[6] In August 1976 it was announced the Producers Group (Robert Fryer, Martin Richards, Mary Lee Johnson and James Cresson) had optioned the film rights to the novel and would make the movie in association with Lew Grade.

[16] To prepare for the roles of the European clones, Jeremy Black was sent to a speech studio in New York City by 20th Century Fox to learn how to speak with both an English and a German accent.

The site's consensus states: "Its story takes some dubious turns, but a high-caliber cast and a gripping pace fashion The Boys from Brazil into an effective thriller.

[24] Variety wrote "With two excellent antagonists in Gregory Peck and Lord Laurence Olivier, The Boys from Brazil presents a gripping, suspenseful drama for nearly all of its two hours — then lets go at the end and falls into a heap.

"[25] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film one-and-a-half out of four stars and called it "old-fashioned filmmaking at its worst," with "one of the phoniest stories you can imagine.

One exasperation of The Boys From Brazil is that, even accepting the biological possibility of the premise, the script by Heywood Gould never confronts any of the interesting questions raised.

"[27] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post called it "admirably crafted and surprisingly effective," and "a snazzy pop entertainment synthesis of accumulating suspense, detective work, pseudoscientific speculation and historical wish fulfillment.

"[28] Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote "If the film wants to be taken as a cautionary fable—another one!—about the ever-present dangers of Nazism, then it should leave viewers with a sense of menace that Mengele's 'boys from Brazil' constitute.

"[29] Jack Kroll of Newsweek wrote that "the thoughts aren't quite deep enough even for a thriller...Heywood Gould's reasonably suspenseful screenplay blows it by suddenly turning Lieberman into a kindly old Jewish uncle instead of a man who is willing to face the tough paradoxes of good and evil.

"[30] Scholars have used the film's idea of controlling an individual's genetics and upbringing to illustrate the difficulties of reconciling traditional views of free will with modern neuroscience.