The Executioner

Possibly the only comedy ever made about capital punishment, Luis García Berlanga’s 1963 masterpiece is a satire so brilliant that it flew under the radar of Franco-era Spanish censorship. There have been quite a few dramatic films on the theme of the death penalty, most of them making an eloquent case against it, and some of them really great—Krzysztof Kieslowki’s A Short Film About Killing and Peter Medak’s underrated gem Let Him Have It come to mind, among many others. But have you ever seen an anti-capital punishment comedy? There is one, and it just happens to be one of…