20/20 Filmsight - Film Criticism by David O'Connell

Documentarian Errol Morris is renowned for his oddball subjects and in Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. he found another keeper. This compelling 1999 feature offers a detailed portrait of this Massachusetts native who stumbled into a very strange line of work: as a consultant to American prisons in the matter of execution apparatus construction.

In the opening half hour Morris explores the increasingly odd preoccupations of this man which began with taggling along as his father went off to work each day in the transportation department of a Massachusetts prison. Initially Leuchter comes across as possessing genuine business acumen; spying a deficiency in the archaic construction of the machinery used to legally end lives, he decided to fill the breach with a series of design modifications aimed at reducing the possibility of malfunctions that cause excruciatingly elongated final moments of torture for those being executed.

From the assistance he provided in reconstructing electric chairs, word of his strange expertise spread; Leuchter suddenly found himself a wanted man and decided to go where the opportunities presented themselves. Before long he was providing paid advice on the reconfiguration of lethal injection machines and even gallows.

Is there anything creepy about all this, you may ask? In one of many instructive asides, Leuchter admits that most people he encounters are morally opposed to his vocational choices. In time he also gets to expound upon the inhumanity of defective equipment, the conductivity of urine, how well he sleeps at night – very well – in response to those averse to his line of work, and the 40 cups of coffee and 6 packs of cigarette a day habits that led him to the woman who would be his short-term wife; the first thing she learned of Fred via a mutual friend was that “he killed people”.

Portrait sketch aside, the crux of Morris's film is Leuchter’s infamous involvement with the legal defence for a German national in Canada who was prosecuted for publishing false history with offensive racial overtones. Ernst Zundel proclaimed the Holocaust a hoax and sought the dubious ‘expertise’ of Leuchter to assist his defence.

With a camera crew in tow Leuchter was invited to venture to a place “where the earth doesn’t rest”, the Holy of Holies, in Auschwitz's most notorious concentration camp site. Here, Fred is seen chiselling away a few rocks here and there before coming to the seemingly unscientific conclusion that absolutely no traces of cyanide could be found in the brickwork.

Morris maintains a neutrality that allows the viewer to make up their own minds as to Leuchter’s possible motivations. Is he just a misguided man who got roped into a cause he didn’t really believe in? Or is he really the hated warmonger and anti-Semite that his involvement in the trial inspired? Perhaps a combination of both. It’s controversial British revisionist historian David Irving who admits - despite a fervent belief in Leuchter’s assessment of Auschwitz - that he’s “a mouse of a man”, and in some ways borders on being “a simpleton”.

Either way, this is Leuchter’s story in his own words - from his rapid ascent, the time of his heavily in-demand status, to his inglorious decline, his reputation evaporating in the wake of the revolt against revisionism. He inspires pity which makes it hard to despise him but then the macabre eccentricity at his core - possibly hinting at more sinister depths - is hardly warming.



I say: Another fascinating documentary from a master documentarian. Though not ranking amongst his greatest hits, Mr. Death still compels.
See it for:The strangely ambivalent feelings it provokes in equal measure.