Word: berlanga
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Your Life offers a mordant answer to the question: Can a hearse driver find happiness with an executioner's daughter? This black comedy from Spain thus uses the weapons of farce to mount a small, stinging attack against capital punishment, though Director Luis Berlanga too often evokes laughter and stifles it at the same time...
...Director Berlanga, to his immense credit, works exclusively with live ones. His characters are sharply observed, warmly played. When Manfredi is summoned at last to finish off a condemned man on the sunny island of Majorca, he takes his wife along for their honeymoon. The gay holidays end with a jolt in a bleak prison courtyard where uniformed guards are forced to drag the reluctant executioner and his victim to ward the hour of judgment. The comment is strong but disappointingly literal, for Life loses ground as a first-rank satire when it stops kidding its message and starts preaching...