Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102186 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-06-06
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 91 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Director Errol Morris has never shied away from difficult subjects: Gates of Heaven explores the world of pet cemeteries, and The Thin Blue Line sets out to prove that hitchhiker Randall Adams did not commit a murder. Morris's view is distinctive; he finds the dark humor and oddity in the most solemn of subjects. His controversial documentary Mr. Death, therefore, should not come as a surprise to audiences.

The film begins on a surreal plane, as Fred Leuchter talks about his career as a designer of execution equipment. The son of a prison guard, Leuchter found himself in the execution game when, as an electrical engineer, he offered his services to help fix the electric chair used in North Carolina. His motivation? Humanitarian; previously the device in place would torture the prisoner before killing him. After his success in North Carolina, other states contacted him to help with their execution devices, and Leuchter helped devise lethal-injection devices, gas chambers, and gallows as well.

From here, though, the film takes an even more bizarre twist. During this time in the late 1980s, Ernst Zündel was arrested in Canada for publishing neo-Nazi materials. Zündel hired Leuchter, as an expert on gas chambers, to go to Auschwitz to gather evidence of the Holocaust. Leuchter surreptitiously videotaped himself illegally gathering chunks of rock from the concentration camp, which he then analyzed. From these results he determined that the Holocaust did not occur, and he became an active historical revisionist. What he viewed as his definitive achievement, his paper The Leuchter Report, ultimately led to his fall, as states wouldn't work with him, Jewish groups targeted him, and neo-Nazis sought him.

Mr. Death is frequently disturbing to watch, and Morris allows Leuchter to speak his mind with few interruptions. The tale that emerges is spellbinding, as Leuchter comes off not as anti-Semitic but as a deluded man with strong albeit misguided convictions. He is a fascinating character, and the only thing missing is more personal information about him beyond his daily intake of 40 cups of coffee and 100 cigarettes. --Jenny Brown

Customer Reviews

A Non-Documentary-Feeling Documentary.
I think it goes without saying that most of the general public don't go wild for documentary films. The masses, that is, generally prefer a fictional cliffhanger/thriller with cleverly prefigured twists and turns.

That said, this is one documentary that would most certainly please those very masses. It plays like the highest rate cliffhanger and while the twists and turns are real, they are as clever as any fictive ones I've seen.

"Mr Death" is the story of Fred Leuchter, a self-taught but obviously intelligent "engineer" of execution equipment that is more humane than that currently in practice. The first part of the film is largely a biography of his rise from working on an electric chair in Tenessee, to redesigning a lethal injection room, a gallows, and even a gas chamber in other states.

If the first half is about his rise, the second half - the title suggests it - pertains to his fall. This happens when Ernst Zundel, a holocaust denier out of Canada, hires Luechter after being brought up on arcane charges by the Canadian government, where it is illegal to deny the holocaust on paper(?). Luechter's job is to go to Auschwitz to determine whether Zundel's claim that there were no gas chambers there is in any way rational. The film chronicles Luecther's travels and ultimate judgement that Zundel is correct.

From there - and Zundel eventually loses the case - Luechter's buzzing career enters a tail spin. No one in the states, that is, wants to work with a holocaust denier, much less on execution equipment. He is blackballed.

Most of the film consists of interviews with Luechter interspersed with scentery pertaining to the events being discussed. (Also interviewed are Ernst Zundel, another holocaust denier David Irving, Luechter's anonymous ex-wife, an historian who followed Luechter's Auschwitz travels with an eye towards discrediting them, and a few others.)

Like other Errol Morris films, Mr. Death will have you thinking about its subject matter long after the stop button has been pressed. It entertains questions such as how we are to feel towards Luechter. Is he an anti-semite who had mallicious intent? Is he an intelligent man who just did faulty research? Is he a man not nearly as smart as he thinks who simply wanted noteriety? Or is he - just entertain the thought - a man who has uncovered a politically unpopular truth? Who is this man Fred Luechter, and what were his motivations?

These questions are left up to the viewer. While I get the feeling that Morris wants us to feel sorry for Luechter as a man who got sloppy due to the excitement of the trial, the film never says one way or the other. The choice is yours.

So whether you like documentaries or mainstream thrillers, this is a film that is sure to ensnare you both while it is playing and after it has played.

Tragically engrossing
"The human body is not easy to destroy."

And so Errol Morris introduces us to the latest intriguing character to sit in front of his Interrotron. Fred Leuchter is a slippery guy. He's a self styled engineer in an industry consisting almost solely of himself: consulting prisons on instruments of execution. Leuchter himself is not even sure how he got there. "I built helmets for electric chairs, so now I could build lethal injection machines," he says. "I now build lethal injection machines, so now I'm competent to build a gallows. And since I'm building gallows, I'm also competent to work on gas chambers, because I've done all the other three." He almost laments that he's been shoe horned into an area that few others would be willing to go, but he does so anyway. He clearly enjoys his line of work and comes to see himself as a real expert. This belief in his own propaganda would be his downfall.

He's a proponent of the death penalty but has a strong conviction that it should be handled "humanely." Those awaiting execution, after decades of imprisonment, are "just like you and me" he argues. He would like to see lethal injection performed in molded seats like a dentist's office has. The condemned could watch TV, listen to music or look at pictures on the wall. Furthermore, execution could be a safe and painless process for the executioners as well. "Nobody should have to place his life in jeopardy because an execution is being conducted." And the beguiling thing about Leuchter is that he is absolutely sincere. He is completely without guile. He clearly wants us to like him.

Errol Morris tends toward the fringes in his selection of subject matter, but he rarely goes wrong. He invented a camera he calls the Interrotron that uses mirrors to show his own face directly over the camera lens. Using this and a prodigious skill as an interviewer, he manages to coax out the very essence of his subjects - often without even them realizing it. Go rent The Thin Blue Line and you'll see what I mean. Leuchter was initially going to be part of his last project, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, but Morris knows a good thing when he sees it and decided to make a new film entirely about Leuchter. And his strange occupation and views on capital punishment would have made a good subject alone. But Fred doesn't end there.

In 1988, Ernst Zundel was on trial under an obscure Canadian law for "publishing information he knew to be untrue." He published books claiming the Holocaust never happened. He called on Leuchter as the only man supposedly familiar enough with the instruments of execution to verify whether Auschwitz' infamous gas chambers really existed. Leuchter was flown to Auschwitz where he stole some brick and concrete samples and had them tested for cyanide. None was found. This gave rise to The Leuchter Report - a now famous document among neo-Nazi groups that supposedly offers evidence that the Holocaust deniers are correct.

Now it would be very easy to paint Leuchter as a simple dupe, but Morris recognizes that he is as much a victim of himself as of the hate groups that he travels around speaking to. In the end, he pays dearly for his botched investigation and his hubris (and is still paying today). Leuchter, believing he was the savior of a wrongly accused man and "the only expert in the world" who could uncover the truth, clings to the knowledge that he was correct, despite all the evidence to the contrary and even his own admitted ineptitude at the sort of investigation he tried to do. The technician who actually performed the tests even confirms that Leuchter was wrong in his assumptions. But Leuchter is a believer.

Morris has given us a masterful film and a look at a man who is anything but simple, but wrapped in a very simple package. He doesn't provide us with ready made answers for the quandaries that exist within Fred Leuchter, but shows him to us in three dimensions. It's not always a pretty picture, but is an engrossing one

A Weird & Subtle Commentary on Freedom of Speech
What a peculiar and compelling documentary! Throughout the first part of this movie, Leuchter talks about his improvements upon various execution devices, and not with a little pride. He *says* he designs these things because the older devices are inhumane, that the electric chairs, for example, "cook" people, torture them, and that he wants to make executions as painless and quick as possible...and, you know, I believe him. He comes off as weird, but sincere.

His underground notoriety as an execution expert motivates holocaust revisionist "historian" Ernst Zündel to hire him to prove to a judge and jury that Nazis did not, in fact, exterminate Jews. So Leuchter goes to Auschwitz and--illegally--gathers samples from the "alleged" gas chambers, crematoriums, and so on. He smuggles these samples back to Canada, and a lab determines that they contain no traces of cyanide gas. Based on this--and this alone, apparently--Leuchter (an engineer, but by no means a research scientist) concludes that the gas chambers were never used to gas inmates, and that the holocaust did not happen.

Leuchter's evidence is easily refuted. It isn't the filmmaker's purpose to prove him wrong, and the refutation is quickly and easily accomplished without belaboring it. What is perhaps most interesting about this film is the manner in which it portrays Leuchter: He comes off as something of a stooge, a naive and terribly misguided participant in perhaps the most politically incorrect of all historical revisionism. As a result of this, he is mercilessly persecuted by people who will not tolerate the existence--let alone promulgation--of opposing points of view. Disagreement is decried as "hate," and in our current social environment, once you have successfully identified someone as a hatemonger, it's open season on him, In this sense, the film becomes a critical examination of a freedom we Americans claim to hold dear: the freedom of expression. It is a freedom that comes with a price, and that is that unpopular, often wacky, ideas will be promulgated by people we may not like. The fact is, though, that Leuchter is not an anti-semite. Morris does not show a man with an ounce of hatred in him, or malice, and so far as we can tell, there is no ideology behind Leuchter's belief that the holocaust did not occur. That Morris manages to show Leuchter in a reasonably sympathetic light forces us to examine the alactrity with which we so often attack and attempt to destroy the speaker of unpopular ideas, when perhaps all we really ought to do is attack the ideas that are being spoken. What makes us uncomfortable as viewers, I think, is that we feel sympathy for this guy. Clearly, he is the victim, more than the persecutor.