Tuesday is French Catch Day: Inca Peruano! Joachim La Barba! Lasartesse! Van Buyten!

Joachim La Barba vs. Inca Peruano 1/17/57 - EPIC

SR: A 30 minute contest 2/3 falls contest, JIP about 7 minutes into it and both guys are already at each others throats. It‘s a battle between rather mysterious figures. We‘ve seen Inca Peruano before as a bumping rudo, although he is in the tecnico role here. Joachim La Barba is mentioned as „The terrible champion of Mexico“ on a fanpage. Genickbruch.com lists him wrestling in Germany as „Abdul Khan“ and in Mexico as „Pancho Zapata“. No guarantee about these facts since there was also another luchador named Pancho Zapata. I really wonder about the background of Inca Peruano – is he actually Peruvian? A Mexican worker with an Inca gimmick? Was he trained in France? No matter where he came from, he shows up a lot in this footage and is clearly a great worker.

This was an absolute slugfest. The kind of match you‘d never see on British or German TV at this point. But here, the announcer was cackling like a madman at these two trying to put some serious hurt on each other. Both guys were really laying in those trademark European uppercuts, cracking each others ribs with thudding kicks and using holds so they could hit the other guy from a safe position. Joachim La Barba was an absolute beast here, throwing punches to the back of the head, constantly stepping on his opponent, walloping him with kicks. At one point, he was driving knees into Inca while holding on to the ropes like a PRIDE fight. He came across as a guy it really sucks to fight, and Peruano's stoic selling performance enhanced the grittiness of the match. Between beating on each other, they work the mat (usually leading to more shots on the ground) and other nifty spots. One of the things they do that you can‘t just do in modern wrestling anymore is the use of the ropes, which were really loose to allow for tying up spots. The „tie up the other guy as revenge“ spot is a staple of German wrestling, but they did some pretty unique shit here. Peruano takes the horrifying looking spill into the ropes where he gets his head tied up and is nearly strangled, later he uses the ropes to hit several Toyota style dropkicks to Joachim's chest, there is also a really swank and well timed head scissor over the ropes. I am absolutely amazed how workers from nearly 70 years ago find unique twists on spots we‘ve seen plenty of times in other matches, such as said rope trickery or La Barba unexpectedly landing on the rope when they went through the classic „pull them off his torso-armbar“ sequence. Also, there is a real sense of bomb throwing towards the end of the match. Both guys hit some flying moves off the top rope which set up the finishes to the falls, and one guy takes a big missed back bump that is put over in a big way. I especially liked how they seemingly improvised Inca Peruano who was slow to get to the rope working a fun cutoff before Barba could catch him.

Even though this was by far the least pretty of all the matches from France we‘ve seen so far, this was a baffling and amazing match, great mix of a violent fight and some pretty unique wrestling, with state of the art finishes.

PAS: I thought this was a real discovery, Peruano had a very lucha style breaking out some headscissors and even a Romero Special. This had a lot of really unique stuff with the ropes, including Peruano getting hung Foley style in the ropes, and then paying La Barba back by locking him in the ropes and putting on a leg stretch, and then later spinning him up in the ropes and hitting some stiff dropkicks. La Barba had some fun stooging, but when he got nasty, he got nasty. He had some of the grossest backbreakers I can remember seeing, really bending Peruano over his knee, and some really great looking uppercuts and cheap shots too. I loved how he landed a bunch of body shots on Inca after he pinned him (with a great looking top rope dropkick).

TKG: Jose Fernandez shared a thing on the history of wrestling in Spain fucking ages ago…and both of these guys were regulars on the Spain scene and who fucking knows this may have been their Marek Brave v Tyler Black touring match. Barba is a real blast as the heel that keeps on getting outsmarted in first fall. He’s always sadistic in his rule breaking while Peruano is always kind of Dusty having fun with his. A bunch of the rope stuff has already been mentioned but I also liked Peruano’s series of arm drags into essentially a monkey flip onto corner ropes, Peruano’s using full nelson to slam and scrape Barba’s face in ropes, and Barba’s knees into Peruano’s back that shoved Peruano into ropes. Barba also does a bunch of landing in the ropes bumps. There was just this real 90’s singles match Bobby Eaton feel of you always knew those ropes are their for Bobby to scrape opponent’s eyes against.

MD: It's funny how we can all see these and get something slightly different from them. From me, the first fall that we have here is something of a comedy match, where Peruano consistently out-slicks La Barba and La Barba completely overcompensates for his humiliation by being a mean bastard. It's an overreaction because it basically doesn't work. He goes too mean, too hard, too brutish, and he gets taken over or down or tied up again. Where it starts to work and where the tide turns is when Peruano gets upset himself, loses his cool and the higher ground, and starts slugging with him. He can't outslug La Barba and he loses the advantage. That's what ultimately lets La Barba hit his downright cruel backbreakers and the missile dropkick to take what has to be the second fall. Peruono shortly thereafter gets over the top and gets his revenge with La Barba tied up in the ropes. After that, things are a bit more even, though La Barba always has this sense of anxious desperation to what he does. You see plenty of novel spots, not just the Romero Special, but a sort of go behind groin lift or a victory roll take over. I might have read a bit too much into the narrative, but I felt it in the moment and it felt pretty novel from a storytelling perspective even compared to even the technically sound and exciting matches we've been watching.


Rene Lasartesse vs. Franz Van Buyten 1/17/72 - FUN

PAS: This was in the middle of a swimming pool for some reason which was a really fun atmosphere. Lasartesse falls out of the rowboat to start which was a fun bit of heel shtick. There was a lot of tight nasty wrestling in this match, but it was clearly building to Lasartesse taking the big Nestea plunge into the pool, which was followed by Van Buyten tossing the ref in as well. Lasartesse had some great looking uppercuts and a big bombs away knee drop off the top which landed right into Van Buyten's throat. This felt more like a traditionally worked match then the other French stuff we have seen (outside of the swimming pool of course) I'll be interested to see when we get more into the 70s whether the style becomes less unique, or that is just related to the guys and the setting.

SR: I got stupidly excited when I saw this match in the archives. Two guys who had an awesome match series in the 1980s (when Franz was nearing 50 and had recovered from a paralyzing back injury, while Lasartesse was looking like a corpse) fighting each other in their prime, what could go wrong? However, the match was lacking focus, and didn‘t play to either guys strength. They were noticeably struggling to kill time, so I guess they did get wiser with age. Still, there was plenty to be enjoyed here: the match takes place in a ring that is floating in a swimming pool, and they send the wrestlers there in tiny little boats while a young Atsushi Onita was furiously taking notes at ringside. Of course the whole match was building to someone getting thrown into the water. For something that could have been a light hearted spectacle, the match was quite violent. After some initial feeling out, Lasartesse quickly took over the match and started working over van Buyten's throat with nasty stomps and elbows. He also busted out plenty of offense, too much offense really, he uncorked like 5 Tombstone Piledrivers on Franz which no matter how much they tried to cover up the following pinfalls should have ended the match. Also, Lasartesse is notorious for not being very good at the actual wrestling and his suplexes looked like shit. Once Franz made his comeback, a heel ref got involved to kill more time. Even when Lasartesse hit the dreaded diving knee to Franz, he couldn‘t end the match. It‘s very strange for a match between two guys who stood out before working no frills story driven matches to suffer from 2019isms such as too many finishers, but here we were. At least we got to see Franz hitting his cool in-ring topes and throwing the evil referee headfirst into the shallow pool.

MD: I wonder how much of the drama of this was taken away by Lasartesse bumping out of the boat on the way in? He started out already wet. It'd be like getting color on the way to the ring? This is obviously a fascinating spectacle, and I wish we had Van Buyten's boat ride too. There's just a weird feeling of dueling in the canals of Venice or some such to this setting. There were about five minutes of Lasartesse being in control, what with stalking around the ring and the tombstones and contentiously dropping Van Buyten too close to the ropes and I absolutely loved that. As much as I like tricked out matwork or the rope running escalation and elaborate comedy spots and everything else we've seen, the most primal element of pro wrestling is the build and payoff of a beatdown and comeback; this was a pretty glorious beatdown, with Lasartesse serving as an amazing looming presence and Van Buyten (who, might I add, we have three scant months later in Japan having an all time comedy six-man interacting with Andre) drawing tons of sympathy, but the comeback didn't reach the level it had to.