The Boys From Brazil

Based on Ira Levin's unsettling novel, this 1978 thriller imagines evil not as spectacle but as administration. Gregory Peck plays Dr. Josef Mengele as chillingly polite, while Laurence Olivier gives weary dignity to a Nazi hunter who senses a vast conspiracy at work. Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, the film asks whether history can be engineered, and what it costs to look away.