El Verdugo

El Verdugo (Spanish for "The Executioner") is a 1963 Spanish-Italian black comedy directed by Luis García Berlanga, in which a timid funeral-parlor employee marries the daughter of a state executioner and, to keep the family's government-allocated apartment, reluctantly inherits his father-in-law's profession. The film is widely regarded as one of the most important works of Spanish cinema and a pointed satire of capital punishment under the Franco dictatorship.^{1 • 2}

Origins and production

The story began with a real anecdote. A friend of Berlanga's, a court-appointed lawyer, told him of an execution he had attended in which the executioner was more frightened than the condemned man and had to be given a tranquilizer.⁹ Berlanga and Rafael Azcona, who had already collaborated on Plácido (1961), turned this material into a script with the collaboration of the Italian screenwriter Ennio Flaiano.^{1 • 10}

The film was shot between Madrid and Palma de Mallorca in the spring of 1963.¹¹ The housing theme was familiar ground for Azcona, who had treated the desperate search for an apartment in El pisito (1959) and El cochecito (1960), both directed by Marco Ferreri; in El verdugo the apartment becomes the instrument that forces the protagonist to renounce his ideas and his dignity.¹²

Censorship and political context

Execution by garrote vil (Spanish execution device strangling victim with iron collar) was still in force in Spain when the film was made, and its production coincided with real executions: in April 1963 the communist Julián Grimau was shot by the Franco regime, and in August of that year the anarchists Francisco Granados and Joaquín Delgado were garroted for an attack they did not commit.¹³

The script passed through numerous revisions and suffered a total of 17 cuts imposed by the censors, who in January 1963 ordered erotic scenes toned down as a condition of authorization; one account puts the suppressed material at 4 minutes and 30 seconds.^{14 • 5} The film was banned from a Brazilian film week in 1964 and from a film-club screening in Toulouse in November 1963.¹⁵

After its Venice premiere, where it won the international critics' FIPRESCI prize and angered the Spanish ambassador in Italy, the film nearly provoked a government crisis: the faction of Carrero Blanco in the Council of Ministers questioned the opening policy of the Ministry of Information and Tourism and demanded that the film be banned or lose its state subsidy, threatening the resignation of minister Manuel Fraga.^{4 • 15} A frequently repeated anecdote holds that Franco, after seeing the film, said in a cabinet meeting: "Berlanga is not a communist. He is something much worse. He is a bad Spaniard."¹⁶

Reception and legacy

The film's awards accumulated across Europe: the FIPRESCI prize at the 24th Venice International Film Festival in 1963, the prize for best original screenplay from Spain's Círculo de Escritores Cinematográficos, the best-actress prize for Emma Penella from the Sindicato Nacional del Espectáculo, the Grand Prize of the French Academy of Humor in 1965, and the Soviet critics' prize at the Moscow Festival, which the film reached in 1965.^{5 • 17} In a 1996 poll of professionals and critics it was voted the second best film in the history of Spanish cinema.¹⁸

Scholarship places the film as the hinge between the renovating Spanish cinema of the 1950s and the Nuevo Cine Español of the 1960s.¹⁹ The critic Carlos Losilla, author of a Spanish film dictionary entry on the film, reads it as moving from political and social critique toward existential skepticism, less a film against the death penalty than a fable about fate and the disintegration of culture amid neocapitalist barbarism.¹⁶ Pedro Almodóvar included it among the 13 great Spanish films that inspire him, and the director Isaki Lacuesta chose it for the Sight and Sound greatest-films poll, calling it a masterpiece whose visual traits remain as fresh as the first day.^{20 • 21} A restored copy was screened in Madrid in 2026 as part of the centenary tribute to Rafael Azcona.²²

References

1. El verdugo (1963), Cultura Berlanga / Berlanga Film Museum
2. El Verdugo / The Executioner, Spain Arts & Culture
3. El verdugo / La ballata del boia (1963), Nosferatu, RIUNET Universitat Politècnica de València
4. Cincuenta años del estreno de El verdugo de Berlanga, Europa Press
5. El verdugo, Los inconformes y las menudencias, ENFOCO 43, EICTV
6. El Verdugo (1963, Luis García Berlanga), Films101
7. El verdugo, Instituto Cervantes Leeds
8. El verdugo, Institut Valencià de Cultura
9. El verdugo (1963), Cineclub UNED
10. Documentos RNE: Los verdugos en el cine español, RTVE
11. 'El verdugo' cumple 60 años: así se rodó la obra cumbre del cine español, RTVE
12. Matar por un piso, Berlanga Film Museum
13. Tematización de la pena de muerte en El verdugo, SEDICI UNLP
14. El verdugo: análisis, Universidad de Zaragoza (Zaguán)
15. Las coproducciones ofensivas, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes
16. Diccionario del cine español: El verdugo (1963), por Carlos Losilla, CVC
17. Cincuenta años del estreno de El verdugo, Brocar, Universidad de La Rioja
18. El Verdugo (1963), SensaCine
19. El verdugo (1963) de Berlanga y su trascendencia en la historia del cine español, Artigrama
20. El verdugo (1963), BFI
21. Isaki Lacuesta voter page, BFI Sight and Sound Greatest Films Poll
22. Rafael Azcona cumpliría 100 años, El País

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Black comedy and satire films › Released 1939 to 1997

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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