Mr. Nazi

Errol Morris's Revisionist rejoices

Watching Ernst Zündel speak out so ridiculously in Errol Morris's Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter, Jr., I naturally dismissed this Ontario-residing neo-Nazi and round-the-clock Holocaust denier as a blowhard and a buffoon. He's not unlike the addled Nazi crazy who pens the "Springtime for Hitler" number in Mel Brooks's The Producers. Morris is making jest of Zündel, isn't he?

Well, not so fast. Check his Web site: Zündel, with a breathtaking capacity for self-deception, actually approves of the way he's portrayed in Mr. Death. "Wow! . . . man was I pleased!" he says of the image of himself therein holding up a placard questioning the Holocaust. With minor reservations, he's "Sieg Heil Thumbs Way Up" in his review of the documentary: "There's never a dull moment in the film! Not one! . . . I was moved by Fred's tragic story and felt empathy for him." His favorite part is when Mr. Death reprises the chilling opening of Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will, in which a plane with the Führer descends on Nürnberg in 1934. Zundel praised the sequence as seeming "as if some god had filmed it."

Although initially suspicious of Morris for, among other things, being Jewish, Zündel returned exalted to Toronto after a four-and-half-hour filming in early 1999 at Morris's Fourth Floor Productions in Cambridge. "He called me afterward and was `flying high,' " reported his female lackey, Ingrid Rimland, who edits the Web's bootlicking Zündel site. "He . . . felt that the documentary could turn out to be an important beachhead for Revisionism -- a breakout of the Revisionist ghetto into a younger, yuppie crowd . . . "

Zündel and a few neo-Nazi followers attended the premiere screening of Mr. Death last September at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival. As is clear by his testimony on the Zündel site, he somehow interpreted the standing ovation after the screening (which surely was for Morris's artistry) as a vindication of his and Leuchter's "no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz" blasphemous reading of history.

And what about the many scenes in which Morris has experts refute every bogus allegation about the Holocaust muttered by Leuchter and Zündel? No problem for Ernst. "In this documentary there are, of course, politically correct concessions. . . . There are the expected Holocaust-promoter interspersions . . . about Fred and I being `racists' and `anti-Semites,' etc. -- but one can sense that Morris put these sequences in to get his documentary past the censors and to secure distribution for the film."

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There are those who consider Billy Wilder's sex farce Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), which screens at 7:30 p.m. this Monday, February 21, at the Coolidge Corner, his underrated masterpiece. But there are more who agree with Time's dismissal of the film as "one of the longest traveling-salesman jokes ever committed to film." I'm in between, appreciating the attempts of Wilder (and his co-writer, I.A.L. Diamond) to step all over the then-still-potent Hollywood Code with smutty jokes and amoral behavior but finding the movie only intermittently funny. If only all the double entendres were as salaciously inspired as when Dean Martin maneuvers a woman into the garden "so she can show me her parsley."

The lively story of Kiss Me, Stupid's making is told with aplomb in Kevin Lally's excellent 1996 bio, Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder. Four weeks into the shooting, star Peter Sellers, says Lally, "suffered a mild heart attack after making love to his wife of less than two months, the actress Britt Ekland (and using amyl nitrate to prolong his performance)." Sellers's replacement by the lesser Ray Walston was the first of many problems that climaxed with the Catholic Church's Legion of Decency's dooming Kiss Me, Stupid with a "Condemned" rating, as priests across America used their pulpits to urge a Catholic boycott.

Kiss Me, Stupid bombed at the box office, and most reviewers despised it. Wilder, shaken, left for a European trip. "The uproar stunned me," he told the New York Times. "Okay, I had made a bad picture, but why the indignation, why the charges that I had undermined the nation's morals?" In 1965, Hollywood screenwriter Ernest Lehman walked into a room where Wilder and Diamond sat in depressed silence. "We're like two parents who have given birth to a mongoloid idiot," Wilder told Lehman, "and we're afraid to screw again."

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A New York Times update. I had editorialized in this column for the hiring of former New York Daily News critic Dave Kehr to replace the retiring Janet Maslin as chief Times film critic. The superbly talented Kehr claimed the public backing of Roger Ebert and, I am told, the private support of Maslin herself. Well, the Times went stubbornly its own way, picking two critics instead of one to take Maslin's place, the first NPR's Elvis Mitchell, the second A.O. Scott, the book editor of Newsday. The latter was discovered when the Times' Culture editor went Net surfing and came upon a Scott essay he admired about Martin Scorsese.

Strange choices? You betcha.