In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
If a country has the death penalty, someone has to carry out the sentence. And nearly every country has some method of preparing bodies for burial, so someone has to do that job also. That doesn’t mean that anyone wants to hang out with the people who do those jobs, nor that they want their children to marry into a family practicing either profession.
Such is the problem faced by Amadeo (José Isbert), an executioner in Madrid, whose beautiful daughter Carmen (Emma Penella) is ready and eager to get married but finds her boyfriends always disappear when they learn what her father does for a living. Handsome undertaker José Luis (Nino Manfredi) has a similar problem: girls like him until they find out what his job is. Could there be some way to solve these two problems at once?
Fortunately, the paths of the executioner and this undertaker cross, which is not surprising since someone has to haul away the bodies. After such an encounter, Amadeo cadges a ride home from José Luis and his partner, but leaves his bag (filled with his executioner’s tools, we later learn) in the van. When José Luis drops by to return the bag, he’s immediately smitten by the voluptuous Carmen, and soon they become a couple with a baby on the way.
Director Luis Garcia Berlanga doesn’t romanticize the lives of these characters. Everyone lives in cramped conditions— José Luis shares a basement apartment with his brother, sister-in-law, and their two kids, while Amadeo and Carmen live in a shabby apartment papered with newsprint. Due to his status as a civil servant, Amadeo is eligible for an apartment in a new building, but when it is revealed that he will retire before the building is completed, they almost lose out. In a flash of inspiration, Amadeo claims José Luis is an apprentice executioner and will take over his father-in-law’s job, which saves the apartment but poses a new problem: he’s a real cream puff who can’t imagine hurting a fly, let alone executing a human being.
The Executioner, a comedy of the blackest hue, takes direct aim at the Franco regime yet somehow managed to evade censorship. With great cleverness, of course: for most of its running length you could easily take The Executioner as a light comedy packed with laughs arising from bureaucratic incompetence and the ordinary kinds of conflicts that arise between people who have barely enough to survive. There’s a more serious theme behind the comic moments, however: the need for ordinary people to survive in a world that seems indifferent to their existence, which sometimes that leads them to act against their conscience. Like José Luis becoming an executioner because of the social benefits that come with the job.
He’s sort of like the people of Omelas who enjoy their refined culture but forget about the small child on whose misery the whole enterprise depends. Or antebellum Southern people reveling in their wealth while excusing their dehumanization of the people whose labor funds their way of life depends. Or armaments manufacturers who love their families but become rich making the tools to destroy families in other countries…you get the idea, he’s all of us, because no one can keep their hands clean while compromising with an immoral society. I feel this on a regular basis when I consider what’s being done with the taxes I pay, but I haven’t figured out a solution yet.
I had never heard of this film or Luis Garcia Berlanga until recently, but both are well known and well regarded in Spain, so I guess I need to get out more. The Executioner won the FIPRESCI Prize and was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1963 and the screenplay won an award from the Cinema Writers Circle of Spain in the same year. More recently, a 1996 poll in honor of the Spanish film centenary named it the second greatest Spanish film of all time. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 840
Technical details: 92 min; B&W; screen ratio 1.85:1; Spanish.
Edition reviewed: DVD (1 disc)
Extras: 2016 video interview with director Pedro Almodóvar, who’s a big fan of this film; 2009 episode of Spanish television program La mitad invisible discussing The Executioner; “Bad Spaniard,” a documentary on Luis García Berlanga; the film’s trailer; illustrated booklet with an essay by film critic David Cairns.
Fun Fact: Capital punishment in Spain at the time this film was made was done by garotte, which is a lot more hands on and personal than just pushing a button. The neck collar used in the process is briefly seen in an early scene when Jose Luis returns Amadeo’s bag to him and there are occasional discussion of technique, so you have a good idea what’s involved.
Parting Thought: The final episode of this film, which alone is worth the price of admission, was based on the reluctance of executioner Antonio López Sierra to execute a woman, the convicted poisoner Pilar Prades Expósito. This raises the question of what it means when a person is OK with capital punishment in general but wants to exempt some specific cases—is that a sign of refined morality, hypocrisy, or something else?
