I watched The Executioner (Luis García Berlanga, 1963) for the first time last weekend. It’s amazing how clueless I am when it comes to Spanish cinema. Set in 1960s Spain, during the last part of Franco’s dictatorship, the film shows a country that appears to be going through a metamorphoses. The executioner’s daughter, who has trouble to find a husband due to her father’s job, hooks up with a gravedigger, who has the same problem. Everything appears to be going fine in this morbid love story until they learn that, because the executioner is retiring, they are going to lose their flat. With a baby on the way, the only option left for them is to continue the family tradition in order to keep the flat, and so the gravedigger reluctantly becomes the new executioner in hopes that he will never have to kill anybody. And so the call for his first execution comes and the whole family travel to Mallorca, allowing us to see the peak of Spain’s development as a major tourist destination and the blatant contrast between the modern foreigners who holiday abroad and the bleak lives of Spanish people, who want to go abroad in search of a better life. The film successfully exposes the contradictions of Franco’s Spain and makes a statement against death penalty without losing for a second its entertaining black humour. Highly recommended.

And you know what else is great about this film? The title sequence. Please don’t miss the music that goes with it.