How does one make a great film while living under a fascist dictatorship? It’s not a question that Hollywood filmmakers are quite having to ask themselves yet, but it’s something that director Luis García Berlanga had to navigate during the majority of his career working in the Spanish film industry under Franco’s rule. The truly amazing thing is that The Executioner in many ways comments on Franco’s government, as its main character works for the state, doing its most unseemly business of carrying out the death penalty. Yet somehow, the film managed to weave its way around the censors while wringing some dark laughs out of the material and commenting on how society forces all of us into doing its dirty work.
The Executioner probably should have been called Executioners (but we’ll get to that film later), since it’s actually about two men who have chosen this most morbid of professions. The first of which is Amadeo (played by José Isbert), an elderly man who has been an executioner for decades and has his own philosophies about death and ways of coping with the fact that death is just an everyday occurrence for him. Then there’s José Luis (Nino Manfredi, a seasoned commedia all’italiana vet), who works in a funeral parlor at the beginning of the film and meets Amadeo while picking up a body. José Luis has a hard time meeting women due to him working with cadavers, so he lives with his brother and his wife and kids. Amadeo’s daughter Carmen (Emma Penella) has a similar predicament, having trouble meeting men because her father is an executioner, so of course, the two of them hook up.
Amadeo finds out about this somewhat farcically while Jose Luis is hiding in the apartment that he and Carmen share, though José Luis agrees to marry Carmen when trying to keep Amadeo from getting mad at him. After José Luis and Carmen marry, they need to find an apartment to live in together and settle on some government-subsidized housing, but quickly find out that they’ll be kicked out after three months because Amadeo’s job as an executioner is coming to an end.
So, in a bid to hold onto a place to live, José Luis agrees to get into the family business after Amadeo retires, though he tries to put off the actual duty of killing someone while employed at this job for as long as possible. This culminates in one of the film’s most striking and tragic (and maybe funny on some twisted level?) moments, where José Luis is forced by a crowd of generals across a giant blank room to a tiny dark door on the horizon, which he must enter and then kill a stranger.
It’s hard to explain exactly what makes The Executioner a comedy when the plot on paper just sounds dark and uncomfortable, and the film never veers into treating these characters’ situations as absurd, but still finds some absurdity in them. The film overall has this sort of slow boil to it, never really going for big physical gags or clever conversations, but instead imbuing the viewer with dread while also providing funny observations that catch you off-guard. Much of this tricky tone is achieved through not only Berlanga’s writing and directing, but also the crisp black and white cinematography from Tonino Delli Colli (who would later work on Sergio Leone’s epics) combined with the deftness of the performances. Manfredi is perfect as this sort of everyman who’s also a bit pathetic, while Isbert has this great craggy lived-in quality, and Penella brings a nuance that tends to get lost in these types of wife/daughter roles in classic European cinema.
In the special features for The Executioner on the Criterion Channel, there’s a short interview with Spain’s ambassador of filmmaking, Pedro Almodóvar. He talks about how in Spanish cinema there are two titans, Luis Buñuel and Luis García Berlanga. Though outside of Spain, Buñuel is far more famous. It’s hard to say exactly why this is, but maybe it has to do with Buñuel’s films being a little less subtle in their ideas and because he, unlike Berlanga, made a decent amount of films outside of Spain. One reason Almodóvar gives is that there are always about five people talking over each other at once in Berlanga’s movies, giving them a very rapid-fire quality, but also making them an awkward candidate for subtitles.
After watching The Executioner, I do hope that Berlanga’s films eventually grow in prominence worldwide, since at least this one got a proper release through Criterion after being underseen outside of Spain for years. Though, I would say that has still yet to happen, since if I’m being honest, I hadn’t heard of this film outside of it being in the Criterion Collection and its cover, featuring a cloaked undertaker holding an ice cream, was the selling point for me. Luckily, the film does actually feature an ice cream cone in one sequence. Yet strangely enough, the film dances around any grotesque visuals to the point that we never see anyone in an executioner’s hood, even if the dark specter of their work seeps into every moment.