Perhaps Berlanga's masterpiece, The Executioner was his eccentric contribution to the contemporary debate raging in Franco's Spain about the regime's particularly gruesome approach to capital punishment. Jose Luis (beautifully played by Nino Manfredi) is a gravedigger who marries an executioner's daughter (Emma Penella). With his father-in-law on the verge of retirement, Jose Luis is faced with an unsettling choice: take up the old man's profession, or lose the government subsidized apartment available to his family. Jose Luis chooses the former and lives happily and peacefully, confident that the prevailing "humanist" mood of the late fifties will render his profession obsolete-until one day a notice arrives that he is to proceed to Palma de Mallorca and perform the garroting of a prisoner. Behind the timely airing of this topic-notorious executions by garroting in fact took place at that time-The Executioner offers a deeply pessimistic portrait of a society in which family pressures force people into monstrous acts. Richard Peña