During Franco's regime in Spain, Luis García Berlanga's "The Executioner" (1963) ran in to censorship trouble in the script stages & also during its release. The Spanish ambassador for Italy, Sanchez Bella, whom Ricardo Muñoz Suay [Assistant director of the movie] knew from his student days when they had been in opposing political camps, insisted on seeing the film before its official screening. When he saw it he was furious; he ranted that it was unpatriotic and anti-Spanish and he accused Berlanga of having been the unwitting dupe of the Spanish Communist party. Venice, that year was seething with left-wing and Anarchist groups demonstrating against capital punishment and against Franco. In Italy, Franco was nicknamed “The Executioner” (the film later opened under the title 'La ballata del boia'—'The Executioner’s Ballad'). In Venice, Spanish officials had already been briefed on the case and knew that the Spanish ambassador did not want the film shown. It seemed to the government that the picture was related to the execution of two Spanish Anarchists on August 17, 1963, only a few weeks earlier, although in fact 'The Executioner' had been shot long before that execution. Muñoz Suay had thought of distributing a poster in Venice reproducing Goya’s famous capricho showing a man being garroted, but he was forbidden to do so. Notwithstanding the official Spanish pressures, 'The Executioner' was screened in Venice. There were some disturbances organized by Anarchist groups, and an effigy was paraded through the streets. The outcome was that the ambassador wrote a long letter to the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affair Fernando Castiella, with a copy to Franco, denouncing Muñoz Suay as "the communist instigator of the film" and Berlanga as having been hoodwinked by the “reds.” The letter also attacked the Minister of Information and Tourism, Fraga Iribarne, and his Director General of Cinematography, Garcia Escudero, accusing them of excessively liberalizing Spanish cinema. Sanchez Bella wrote, “This film seems to me to be one of the greatest libels ever perpetrated against Spain, an incredible political tract, not against the regime but against all of Spanish society.” Sanchez Bella, it turned out, was after Fraga’s ministerial job, and ultimately he was to succeed in his purpose, initiating the most sinister period in the late Franco era. In a Council of Ministers meeting in Madrid, Franco was to comment, “I well know that Berlanga is not a Communist. He is something far worse: a bad Spaniard.” After instructions from the censors to cut or alter five of its scenes had been followed, 'The Executioner' was finally released in February 1964. But it was given only a short run in Madrid. Many years later, the exhibitor, Garcia Ramos, commented that official pressures forced him to pull the film out of his theater after only two weeks. The troubles that 'The Executioner' had run into so discouraged and infuriated Berlanga that he withdrew from direction. His next film was not made until four years later in Argentina. ("Behind the Spanish Lens: Spanish Cinema under Fascism and Democracy", Peter Besas, 1985) P.S: Remembering the legendary Spanish filmmaker Luis García Berlanga on his 105th birthday!