Madrid. Jose Luis is an undertaker who wants to quit his job and re-train as a car mechanic. One day, he returns the bag of executioner Amadeo, who forgot it, and meets his daughter Carmen. Since nobody wants to date Carmen due to her father's morbid job in which he strangles convicts with a metal garrote, she starts dating Jose Luis. They get married, but due to an administrative error, they cannot get a new government-sponsored apartment since Amadeo is retiring soon as a civil servant. He thus persuades Jose Luis to officially declare that his new job is an executioner, thereby securing the apartment. A man is sentenced to death by a court in Mallorca and a frightened Jose Luis is sent to execute him. Amadeo assures him that the convict will be pardoned, but in the end, Jose Luis has to execute the convict. Jose Luis later returns to his family and says he will never execute anyone again.
Phenomenal "The Executioner" is ostensibly a comical movie about the problems of newlyweds, but is in reality a dark meditation on the death penalty in Spain during the Francoist dictatorship. The director Luis Garcia Bertanga plays the movie as a comedy most of the time, yet is able to keep his clever-subversive tone throughout, skilfully avoiding government censorship. There is no empty walk, there is no wasted scene, everything is needed to bring the point at the end across—namely to awaken the viewers' awareness about all the contradictions of Francoist rule: it is ostensibly conservative, religious, moral, yet at the same time upholds a death penalty. The sole concept of an undertaker marrying the daughter of an executioner, since nobody wants to date them due to their morbid profession, has several funny gags. For instance, in one sequence, executioner Amadeo takes Jose Luis' finger and places it on the electric chandelier, burning it, then claiming that an electric chair has even more voltage, a thusand volts, which burns a convict, and that his method of strangling convicts is thus more "humane".
The scene where Jose Luis talks to Amadeo in the apartment to ask for the hand of his daughter, but Jose Luis' pants fall down in the middle of his sentence, so he quickly pulls them back up again, is hilarious, whereas even the sole wedding sequence is grotesque: the priests pull back a rug on the floor, while another one extinguishes the fire on the candles, until the couple Jose Luis and Carmen are practically wed in semi-dark, whereas the best man almost flees from the church before he even signed the document. This is practically a symbol for false family values in Spain at that time, contaminated by morbid, immoral authoritarianism which constantly pretends that everything is ideal. The finale reaches the limits of black humor where Jose Luis as an executioner is more nervous and frightened than the sole convict who is just calm all of the time. When Jose Luis wants to abandon the execution, the prison warden refuses: "The convict can't wait!" Bertanga combines slapstick, farce, black humor and social criticism into a surprisingly fluent whole, even in the end showing what he feels about the death pentalty and the grotesque profession that it became, since murder is difficult to come across as business as usual.
Grade:+++
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