The Executioner

“All of Spanish cinema derives from Buñuel and Berlanga. It’s unfair that Berlanga hasn’t been accorded the same status or importance as Buñuel.”
– Pedro Almodóvar

State executioner Amadeo (José Isbert) lines up undertaker Jose Luis (Italian star Nino Manfredi) to wed his daughter Carmen (Emma Penella), a proposition that includes several tangible benefits but one significant drawback: Jose Luis is expected to step into his prospective father-in-law’s position when he retires. Well, he figures its unlikely that he will ever have to actually use the garotte, right… ?

This under-seen classic of Spanish cinema is not just a condemnation of the death penalty (still very much in use in Franco’s Spain) but a scathing black comic critique of the social hierarchies and economic frameworks that entrap us all. General Franco would denounce Berlanga as “worse than a Communist, he’s a bad Spaniard,” but since the dictator’s death El verdugo has come to be regarded as the greatest Spanish film ever made.

It’s an indictment of capital punishment on par with Oshima’s DEATH BY HANGING and Kieslowski’s A SHORT FILM ABOUT KILLING, but this pitch-black comedy, released at the peak of the Franco era, is less timely agitprop than timeless study in ordinary desperation.

Jose Teodoro, Film Comment

A hidden gem for lovers of morbid, grotesque social comedies.

Nicolas Bell, ioncinema.com

Regularly voted by its country’s critics as the best Spanish film of all time, Berlanga’s brilliantly dark comedy on the peculiar horror of the garotte has not lost its power over the years. Full of sharp and disturbing insights into the corrupt world engendered by the Francoist mentality.

Time Out