Watch Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. For Free

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Fred A. Leuchter is a man whom you want to despise, to hate with all your being. It's easy to do. How could a man be so foolish and ego-maniacal? He was already fortified with a solid career as an engineer who helped manufacturer and supervise the more 'humane' developments of the electric chair, lethal injection, hanging, and gas chamber methods of capital punishment. On that point, whether or not you agree with the death penalty, he worked as a professional (or at least in his mind he did, to where he was contracted all over the country). But then came the neo-Nazi/holocaust denier from Canada who drafted Leuchter- a man who never faced defending such a man (albeit he still to this day believes any person has a fair right to a defense, and still albeit in Canada)- to go to Poland and Germany, dig up some samples off the fronts of the walls in the dilapidated concentration camps, and see if gas was to be detected. He brought back samples (undercover), gave it to a scientist, who found there were no traces of gas. Imbued by this, he wrote the 'Leuchter Report', and then everything went to hell...In Errol Morris's film of Mr. Death, Leuchter is portrayed in a very complex manner. You're not sure what to make of him going from scene to scene; he knew what he was doing was for science- he professes also to this day to not be anti-Semitic, this despite his appearances as a guest speaker with "Revisionist History" groups- but he wasn't the right person for the job, if the job should've even been considered in the first place. As the scientist at the Massachusets facility Leuchter (not saying what really for) brought the samples said, there wasn't enough real data to prove or disprove anything about what was in the walls. Also, Leuchter didn't do his homework on matters surrounding the camps. Any filmmaker might've just focused on this portion of Leuchter, as his most notorious moment which was his own undoing (no more career, no more wife, reduced to trying to sell half a lethal injection machine).But Morris has the first half hour of the film as an utterly fascinating dissection of the mechanics and physics of cooking a man with electricity, or the gears of making sure that injecting a man's death is by all means 'comfortable'. He's a guy who drinks, astonishingly, 40 cups of coffee, smoking 6 packs a day, and seems perfectly normal. With this prelude, we're given what seems to be another of the honorable defectives in a line of Morris films (i.e. Gates of Heaven, Vernon Florida, Fast Cheap and Out of Control). So by the time the Leuchter report story unfolds, he comes off as, in a way, more pathetic than really evil. As one of the other interviewees observes, he's not naive (hence the money he was paid and the notoriety he soaked up before the big fall in reputation), and he also believes in free speech and the right to a defense, so on and so on. He's certainly not a man one would usually want to have a cup of Joe with. But pure evil? Mr. Death is one of Morris's most peering and uncompromising documentaries, and this time his profile of this not-quite tragic figure allows for him plenty of room for contemplation- not about if the holocaust didn't happen, lord knows Morris isn't out for that, and I'm sure he would believe the jury is in, but about the dangers of pride in one's work (i.e. "Leuchter wasn't Sherlock Holmes"), and as well about the nature of execution itself. We're given the plethora of chilling visuals from Morris's great abstract sensibility: extreme close-ups of flesh being prepared to get killed, of Leuchter preparing in one of the execution rooms, of him just walking down the side of a highway out of focus (lit wonderfully, most of the time, by Robert Richardson). And, of course, the head-on close-ups where we're getting the full scoop right between the eyes. It adds to a sense of mild-mannered terror, at least in the Leuchter bits, even when he's talking like a rational being (which is off and on).What strikes the most about Mr. Death, however, is how Leuchter justified himself by either providing some human decency, or in providing facts. Both have the tinge of delusion, more or less, and at the same time an earnestness in how he views himself in relation- clinically- with his subjects. How human, exactly, is Leuchter himself? His marriage happened almost on a lark to get away from his mother. He rarely cracks a joke. He's almost reminiscent of some side character no one thinks about in some science fiction film. And you never want to look away from him. Eerie

Despite your political views on the topics of capital punishment and/or The Holocaust, this film is an interesting expose' into ONE man's intellectual, emotional and spiritual drives. An allusion to his upbringing and guidances was particularly fascinating, to me. One of the truest of documentaries I've seen. Thankfully, the filmmakers avoided dramatizing or projecting, to any great degree. It was, perhaps a bit conclusive. However, the film did not insult my intelligence. It left some things to the imagination, which I appreciate. It has led me to further study of the man, and the topics presented. It was also quite visually appealing. What more can you ask?

This is a movie in which the protagonist appears to be little more than an eccentric and (at first) "humane" engineer of killing machines. By the end of the movie they are seen as much less - or much more. This is the story of a person who's aspiration for recognition get the better of them and the costs of those aspirations. Morris demonstrates better than in almost any of his other documentaries why he is a master of this form. Mr. Leuchter takes an abundance of rope with which to hang himself and insists he 'did the right thing'; though it seems amply obvious to almost anybody watching this fascinating movie that he had no business involving himself in the "project" in the first place. He had no idea that the stakes he was playing for were so large and his failure to accept his limited knowledge effectively ruins what was for him, a very lucrative hobby. Maybe a better name for this remarkable documentary would be *Hubris*, since Mr. Leuchter lacks it in spades...

like i'm sure other people have said this guy isn't a very worthwhile subject. sure, our society has a morbid fascination with death, and it's funny hearing him talk about how much he smokes and how much coffee he drinks, but he's into giving himself an unworthy mystique. anyway, the bottom line is that he's a moron racist using feeble methods to try to disprove the mountain of evidence of the holocaust, and as such he should be forgotten by time. but Morris is in love with any kind of curiosities, which normally i wouldn't fault him for.