General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Executioner

The Executioner (original title El verdugo, also released as La ballata del boia and Not on Your Life) is a 1963 Spanish-Italian black comedy directed by Luis García Berlanga, in which an undertaker marries the daughter of the state executioner and, to keep the family's government-allotted apartment and salary, reluctantly inherits his father-in-law's job.¹ The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August 31, 1963, won the FIPRESCI Prize there, and is now regarded as one of the greatest Spanish films.²^•¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title / year	El verdugo, 1963, Spain and Italy, black comedy³
Director and writers	Luis García Berlanga; screenplay by Berlanga, Rafael Azcona, and Ennio Flaiano¹
Principal cast	Nino Manfredi (José Luis), Emma Penella (Carmen), José Isbert (Amadeo), José Luis López Vázquez (Antonio)¹
Premiere	Venice Film Festival, August 31, 1963; FIPRESCI Prize winner, Golden Lion nominee²^•⁴
Spanish release	February 17, 1964, Madrid²
Format	Black-and-white 35 mm feature³
Key crew	Cinematography Tonino Delli Colli; music Miguel Asins Arbó; editing Alfonso Santacana³
Later standing	#72 in the 2012 and #85 in the 2022 BFI Sight and Sound greatest-films polls⁵

Spoilers

Plot

José Luis (Nino Manfredi) is a funeral-parlor employee who dreams of emigrating to Germany and training as a mechanic. His girlfriend Carmen (Emma Penella) loses suitors as soon as they learn that her father Amadeo (José Isbert) is the town's professional executioner, and José Luis suffers the same rejection from women because of his own trade.⁶^•⁷ When Amadeo surprises the couple together, he forces them to marry; facing the newlyweds' lack of money and housing, and with his own retirement approaching, he persuades José Luis to apply for the executioner's post he is vacating, since the position carries a state salary and an apartment.⁶^•¹

José Luis accepts on the understanding that he will never actually have to execute anyone, a hope Amadeo encourages with the reassurance that sentences are always commuted at the last moment. The promise fails: the authorities summon him to carry out a real execution, and the film's final sequence shows him dragged to the gallows as unwillingly as the condemned man himself.⁶^•⁷^•⁸

Origins and historical context

A real anecdote. Berlanga said the film began with a story told to him by a friend who worked as a court-appointed lawyer: an execution in which the executioner was more frightened than the condemned man.⁹ The final scene draws on a documented case, the 1959 execution in Valencia of the poisoner Pilar Prades Expósito, carried out unwillingly by executioner Antonio López Sierra, who had to be plied with brandy.¹⁰

The film was made in Spain in 1963, nearly 25 years into the Franco dictatorship, which had come to power in 1939 after the Civil War and lasted until Franco's death in 1975.¹¹ Berlanga described the film as an attack on capital punishment and on what he called "the invisible traps that society sets up for us," and Film Lincoln Center notes it was inspired by brutal executions carried out by the Francoist government.¹^•¹² Berlanga himself said the image that first came to him was a huge white room with a small door at the far end, two groups dragging two people, one to die and one to kill: society forcing both.¹³

Reception and censorship

At Venice the film won the FIPRESCI Prize from the international critics' jury and was nominated for the Golden Lion.⁴ The honor was noted even by the regime's official newsreel NO-DO, which reported in September 1963 that "our compatriot Berlanga obtained the critics' prize for his film El verdugo."¹⁴ The political climate was tense: Francoist Spain was then under international pressure over the death sentence of the Communist leader Julián Grimau, and Spain's ambassador denounced the film as "communist."¹⁰ Sources differ on the ambassador's name, giving it as Sánchez Vega¹⁰ or as the ambassador to Rome, Alfredo Sánchez Bella.¹⁵

Censorship did reach the film: the Italian encyclopedia Treccani records that the censors intervened on the screenplay and imposed further cuts after the Venice premiere, while noting how much Berlanga still managed to show behind the film's humorous surface.¹⁶ The Spanish theatrical release followed on February 17, 1964 in Madrid.²

Awards

The film won five awards and received two nominations in total.⁴ The Cinema Writers Circle of Spain gave Rafael Azcona and Luis García Berlanga its 1964 award for Best Original Story.⁴ The Sant Jordi Awards named it Best Spanish Film of 1963, and the National Syndicate of Spectacle gave Emma Penella its prize for Best Female Star.⁴ Nino Manfredi was nominated for a Silver Ribbon as Best Actor by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists in 1965.⁴ The Spanish film-registry record also lists a 1965 Grand Prix du Humour Noir from the French Academy.¹⁷

Place in Berlanga's career

Luis García Berlanga (1921-2010), a Valencian director, made 17 films over half a century and is counted among the major figures of Spanish cinema; his early period produced Bienvenido Mister Marshall (1953), Calabuch (1956), Plácido (1961), and El verdugo (1963).¹⁸ El verdugo was an early product of his collaboration with screenwriter Rafael Azcona, which the Criterion Collection describes as an unerring depiction of society's traps.¹ In later decades the film kept its standing: it placed #72 in the 2012 BFI Sight and Sound poll and #85 in 2022,⁵ and Pedro Almodóvar, who discovered it in film school in the mid-1980s, has cited it among the Spanish classics that shaped his ambition to make black comedies satirizing human beings and their institutions.¹⁹ The Criterion Collection issued it on home video as Spine #840 with a restored 4K digital transfer.¹

Versions and runtime

The film's reported length varies by source and version: the Spanish film registry lists 87 minutes for the current video and commercial prints,³ Film Lincoln Center and several festival programs list 90 minutes,¹² Criterion lists 92 minutes,¹ and the BFI and the Azcona archive list 110 and 111 minutes respectively.²⁰^•¹⁷ The registry also records later Spanish re-release data of 35,142 admissions and €31,773.50 in box office.³

References

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

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