“He looks like a normal person. If we met in a café, I’d never suspect it”

The person being described here is Amadeo (José Isbert), a humble old man who is on his way to retirement after years of service to his craft. What most people don’t realize when they see him walking through the Madrid streets he knows so well is that he has been working as a state executioner for over forty years, gaining experience few in his profession are ever able to acquire, mainly through his dedication to the job, and that every call to end the life of a condemned criminal is just another day at the office for him. He encounters José Luis Rodríguez (Nino Manfredi), a young undertaker who yearns to quit his job and take up a career that doesn’t require daily interactions with corpses. This makes his burgeoning friendship with Amadeo all the more bizarre, since the two men have very different views of capital punishment, with the older man viewing it as an essential service, while the younger is vehemently against such a barbaric, outdated practice. Their conflict is forced to continue when Amadeo’s daughter, Carmen (Emma Penella) falls pregnant with José Luis’ baby, necessitating a hasty marriage to prevent the child from being born out of wedlock. Concurrently, Amadeo continues to appeal to the government to provide him with a small apartment, as an incentive for being a dedicated civil servant. However, since he’s near retirement, they refuse. This is the opportunity José Luis had to quit his job – albeit not in the way he expected. He’s pushed to don the executioner’s hood, with his wife and her father assuring him that he’ll likely never have to execute anyone, and would just have the job in title. This proves to be false hope, since a letter eventually arrives for the rookie executioner, giving him the assignment of travelling down to Mallorca for the execution of a sickly man – and now suddenly, Jose Luis is thrust into a world he doesn’t quite understand but is expected to know extremely well, as part of his job descriptions.

There’s a distinct lack of morality in The Executioner (Spanish: El Verdugo), the deliriously brilliant dark comedy written and directed by provocative filmmaker Luis García Berlanga, which has risen from infamy to one of the most esteemed works of cinema in the history of Spain, upheld as one of the nation’s finest works of subversive comedy. It’s certainly not all that difficult to see why this film continues to endure as something of a classic over half a century later – nothing ages quite as well as an effective dark comedy, and even when it is made as a satirical piece that comments on a particular period in time, the message often resounds to the present day, and at the very least turns the work into a time-capsule of a specific time in history, offering peculiar and compelling insights into the social practices and cultural zeitgeist of that era. The Executioner is certainly not a film that conceals its intentions – Berlanga seems to be vehement in his own refusal to abide by any conventions, and instead of following the guidelines established by more traditional cinema, he instead deviates and goes in his own unique direction, creating a singularly brilliant work that isn’t only terrific satire in its potent, acidic belligerence to the subject it portrays, but a masterful work of cinematic artistry, woven together with precision and dedication by a filmmaker whose inability to adhere to what we’d expect may be initially quite bewildering from the first frames of the film, but ultimately is a rewarding experience, if only because there aren’t many films with the gutsy inclinations and willingness to not only challenge the social constructs it attempts to subvert, but also provokes the audience through inciting discourse that may be uncomfortable, but is undeniably effective and resounding, even by modern standards.

Satire is a topic that has no shortage of potential aspects to discuss, since no two satires are exactly the same, many of them having certain qualities that make them entirely compelling and insightful to explore. I’d argue that some of the most effective comedy has been made, quite ironically, in times of bleak, harrowing hardship. The Executioner was made at the height of the rule of Francisco Franco, whose decades-long reign over Spain remains a contentious subject, with some praising him as the embodiment of order and conservative values, others reviling him as a figure who wrought nothing but tragedy. It’s quite clear that Berlanga embodied the latter, whose work took on the role of resistance art, made in outright defiance of the principles of his culture. While an in-depth discussion on this era in history would be out of place (and inconsequential, as the real-world context is only marginally related to the story being told here), it’s important to situate The Executioner at a particular temporal moment, if only as a guideline to looking at the director’s very peculiar brand of satire, and further bolstering the aching anguish that underpins the story and makes it an insightful glimpse into a moment in history that may not be familiar to many outsiders. Bordering on absurdist in its flippant portrayal of social strata, but anchored by its unwavering humanity, the film succeeds in how it finds the perfect balance between bold, broad strokes of outrageous comedy (with some truly hilarious moments pervading throughout this film) and more subtle social commentary that sees the director demonstrating considerable restraint, an achievement for a film as preoccupied with one of the darkest concepts imaginable, still finding a way to address death in a way that is both elegant and highly penetrating.

As the words at the start of this review imply, The Executioner is a film primarily focused on exploring the trials and tribulations of someone who deals in death as a career and showing their more human side. There is a tendency to view executioners as masked, mysterious figures that seem to come from another reality entirely – Berlanga is openly defying these conceptions in favour of a more insightful exploration of the human condition. In order to accomplish this deft feat, he employs a small cast of wonderful actors to interpret this darkly comical story and make it their own. The two protagonists in particular had the most challenging responsibility, namely to take individuals who essentially peddle state-sanctioned murder (whether they see it as such or not, one of the main conflicts in the film and an aspect that propels it forward) and making them endearing, while not glamourizing their profession or making it seem like they’ve chosen admirable career. The Executioner is a film about good people who are forced into doing bad things as a result of necessity – they don’t actually view the act of execution as one that requires all that much craft (even if one of the film’s most masterfully disturbing scenes sees the older of the two conversing with an academic to the virtues of the garotte, which is only made more unsettling by their blasé discussion of its merits as if it were a recreation). In this regard, Berlanga extracts incredible performances from José Isbert and Nino Manfredi, the archetypal odd couple forced to reconcile their inner quandaries while fighting to survive in a social landscape that is inherently stacked against them. They both have numerous merits, but its Isbert who leaves the largest impression, playing the friendly Amadeo in such a way that the entire film seems to conflict with the line of work he’s involved himself in for decades. The opening words here refer to Isbert’s character, whose arrival is almost anticlimactic, especially after a parade of large, looming figures weave their way across the screen, only for the more terrifying of all of them to be a diminutive, elderly man whose friendly demeanour is a stark contrast for his reputation.

The Executioner is quite an impressive achievement – occurring at the perfect intersection between comical farce (with some moments of genuine slapstick thrown in for good measure), and razor-sharp satire that isn’t afraid to be macabre, as long as the audience is able to discern some of the more heartfelt content that underpins it. It is essentially a film of contradictions, a bad of unclassifiable honour it wears with nothing but pride. A cold-hearted satire disguised as an off-beat comedy of manners is rarely going to be an easy film to sell to cynical audiences, but somehow, Berlanga manages to pull it off with nothing but ease. There’s a rich sense of personality to this film, showing that it knew exactly what it wanted to be, and while this is certainly a feature of some of the best entries into this genre, The Executioner defies expectations by also being surprisingly warm, distancing this film from the more arid, icy satires that tend to pervade the culture with their cynical, hardened view of society and its flaws. The fact that the film is able to be so endearing despite the horrifying subject matter is a wonderful anomaly, as is its refusal to take one particular side. Undeniably, its made from the perspective of someone who vehemently disagrees with the death penalty – however, the film is more interested in providing a debate than it is shepherding the viewer to think one way or the other, inviting us to assert our own views onto what is depicted. The Executioner demonstrates a new kind of narrative neutrality, showing us the earnest truth, but not in a way that suggests an attempt to be moralizing or preaching to the audience. Ultimately, the film works because of how it challenges its subject, both in terms of form and content, blending genres and conventions in such a way to create a sense of upbeat, jovial comedy with a ferocious anger simmering just below it, harbouring a very serious message that eventual cumulates in one of the most fascinating, unforgettable dark comedies of its, or any, era.