Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Mr. Death / The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. / USA / 1999

Mr. Death is a central Errol Morris film. For one, it announces his preoccupation with death — one that’s evident in every nonfiction film Morris has made — in its very title. It is told in the scattershot editing and varied film stocks that propel both Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and The Fog of War, but it also recalls The Thin Blue Line with its abstracted, cropped slow-motion reenactments. The score is Caleb Sampson’s second for Morris (he also scored some of the earlier First Person episodes). It’s not the best of Morris’ later kaleidoscope documentaries, but perhaps a stylistic and tactical exemplar.

Fred Leuchter was originally among the four men whose unusual occupations Morris weaves between in the masterful Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, but Leuchter’s story — he engineers the manufacture of electric chairs and lethal injection units — has an enormous controversy that disables abbreviation. In 1988, he was enlisted by the defense in the trial of Ernst Zündel, who published literature that denied the existence of the Holocaust. Specifically, Leuchter was commissioned to travel to Auschwitz and investigate the locations of several gas chambers—this visit to Europe, Leuchter’s first, doubled as his honeymoon. Leuchter’s visit was extensively documented, and footage from much of it appears in Morris’ film. There is an especially harrowing sequence in which Leuchter is chiseling samples from the floor and walls of a dilapidated, damp room, and a voice-over informs us that in a geographical map of human suffering, this very spot would be its nucleus.

Although he has maintained otherwise on his website, Morris doesn’t seem to be accusing Leuchter (of profiting off of controversy, or fueling said controversy in an effort to increase his own renown), although he includes the responses of many who do. The aftermath of Leuchter’s investigation — compiled and published in The Leuchter Report — found him without a wife and without a career. Mr. Death thus becomes a sympathetic portrait of a man, however chastised, justly or not, who has lost everything.

by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Universal Pictures DVD
06 Nov 2006 12:50 PM | Submit Comment