The Executioner
It’s only towards the end of The Executioner (El Verdugo) that it becomes really obvious what writer/director Luis García Berlanga is up to. Released in 1963 during the Franco era in Spain, when to criticise the regime was to court disaster, it looks to all intents and purposes like a light comedy, maybe like Italian ones starring Marcello Mastroianni, or British ones featuring Leslie Phillips, or the ones Billy Wilder was still reliably turning out in the USA. It focuses on José Luis (Nino Manfredi) a young undertaker in Spain who’d rather be an engineer in Germany, who we meet at a prison where he’s about to take delivery of a body recently … Read more