In her book Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean, one of the foremost American proponents for the abolition of the death penalty, wrote: ‘Government ... can’t be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.’ But in the 1960s, under the feared dictator Francisco Franco’s regime, capital punishment was very much in vogue in Spain, as we learn from the opening sequence of the acclaimed Spanish director and screenwriter Luis García Berlanga’s criminally underrated and unfairly under-viewed tragicomedy masterpiece El Verdugo (1963) a.k.a. The Executioner a.k.a. Not on Your Life.
As the film begins, a prison guard has his breakfast interrupted with the arrival of a mortician and his assistant, the latter carrying a coffin on his shoulders. Through a second door emerge a handful of government officials, including the counsel of defence, and an aged, affable man, carrying with him a case. He is, the mortician tells his assistant, the eponymous executioner. The duo and the coffin now enter through the same door, only to re-emerge a moment later. Only this time, they are holding the casket up at both ends, indicating there is a body inside. Thus, subtly, the spectre of death enters the frame, and will hover around the main characters throughout the film. However, like the morbid act of the execution itself, it will never really come out in the open.
The elderly, genteel executioner is Amadeo (played brilliantly by the renowned Spanish actor José Isbert). As the mortician’s assistant, José Luis (portrayed by the Italian actor Nino Manfredi) tells his boss, ‘…he looks like a normal person’, the first of the many wrong impressions that we harbour about an executioner gets snuffed out. A veteran of forty years in the gruesome profession of garroting, Amadeo has a long time ago come to terms with the reality that ‘executioners are misunderstood people’. That is why, he does not take it as an affront when the prison guard looks distastefully at his case containing the tools of his trade that he had mistakenly placed on the same desk where the guard was having his breakfast. Nor is he shaken by the obvious irritation his innocuous query about when the first streetcar arrives is met with.
A chance visit to Amadeo’s residence reveals to José Luis that he is not really popular among his neighbours, either, who consider themselves ‘respectable people’. But when the young undertaker meets Amadeo’s spinster daughter Carmen (Emma Penella), something starts brewing between the two hearts, and it is not just the coffee that Carmen dutifully offers him.
As the two start coming closer, they find that they share something in common. Carmen confides to José Luis that all her fiancés have run away the moment they had learnt that she was an executioner’s daughter. José Luis tells her in return that every girl has left him when they had realised that he earns his bread by working as an undertaker. While death parts other couples, in this particular case, it brought two hearts together.
Coaxed by his boss, who is also Amadeo’ friend, and browbeaten by being unfortunately caught in bed with Carmen when Amadeo had barged into the house unannounced, the unassuming undertaker has no other option but to abandon his dream of going to Germany and become a mechanic, and get married to Carmen, instead. But surely, there is no place in his own house for his new bride, which is already bursting at its seams as a result of the presence of José Luis’s younger brother Antonio (curiously played by an actor named José Luis López Vázquez)—a tailor by profession—his shrewish wife, and their two children. Moreover, on the day of the wedding, disgusted that his brother had taken an executioner’s daughter as a bride, Antonio had proclaimed that he would be parting ways with his elder brother.
But good news arrives in the form of a missive that declares that in recognition of his four-decade-long service, Amadeo has been granted a three-bedroom flat. However, as fate would have it, the soon-to-be-retired executioner is told that he will lose the flat the moment he is out of work. Hence, the future of the family, which is on the verge of welcoming a new addition, seems to hang on whether an individual, who is an expert at interring, can now become equally proficient at garroting.
The very idea of earning his livelihood by taking someone’s life is unimaginable to José Luis. But his feeble protests stand no chance while facing the incessant haranguing of his father-in-law, who keeps insisting that he take the job and make the flat theirs simply because ‘…they sentence people, but, in the last moment, they're going to pardon them!’ Begrudgingly, the undertaker, who has always believed that ‘People should die in their own beds’ accedes to Amadeo’s request, while dreading the day when he will be called to ‘work’. To his utter dismay, his fear soon becomes reality, when he is summoned to Mallorca to execute a condemned convict.
A close scrutiny of all timeless comedies will reveal a common thread. If one scratches their funny, frothy façade, one will invariably find pain and pathos running deep. Berlanga’s El Verdugo is no exception.
The film is full of both wry, satiric humour as well as laugh-out-loud moments. Take for example, the scene when José Luis visits Amadeo’s house for the first time. On the wall, he spies a framed photograph. Noticing his gaze, a nonchalant Amadeo tells the young undertaker that it is one of his ‘clients’, and then goes on to show him the wristwatch that the man had gifted the executioner. A horrified José Luis now turns his attention to another wall, this time adorned with more than one portraits. Pre-empting the unasked query, the aged man replies, in an equally casual manner: ‘No, those are just my relatives!’ Or the scene when Carmen wants to buy a new shirt for José Luis., and Amadeo takes one look at his son-in-law’s neck to announce: ‘It’s a size forty-one!’
While peppering his film with such smile-inducing moments (the wedding scene is uproariously funny), maestro Berlanga and his frequent collaborator, co-writer Rafael Azcona, have not, for a moment, allowed the subliminal anti-capital punishment message of their film to get diluted. By condemning the duplicity of governments that proclaim they want to protect the lives of citizens, and at the same time sentence them to their deaths, Berlanga and Azcona state their message aloud through Amadeo, when he suddenly grasps the hand of his would-be son-in-law and brings it near a lamp socket to say: ‘ That is only 250 volts! They make me laugh when they say public garroting is inhuman. Is the guillotine better then? Do you think it’s fair to bury a man in pieces?....The Americans they use the electric chair, which leaves them carbonised, scorched’.
The director-screenwriter duo also delivers the same message subtly, in the unforgettable penultimate sequence of the film, by raising the all-important question: Who really dies and who gets killed at the garrote, gallows or guillotine?
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