Tuesday is French Catch Day: Corne! Le Boulch! Delaporte! Villars! Amor! Gueret!

 Jean Corne vs. Robert Le Boulch 9/3/59

SR: 1 Fall match going about 16 minutes. Robert Le Boulch is short, has a massive skull and is balding, and he has a funny little mustache. He decided to cheap shot Corne some, and Corne outwrestled him easily, then Robert threw some more cheapshots, and Corne unleashed a full blown retaliation that had Robert Le Boulch flying all over the place. Le Boulch was a bump machine and a fun enough discovery to carry this short match in which Jean Corne showed even less character than usual.

MD: To make sure everyone's clear on this, Corne is not Corn, though he was already middleweight champ and is announced at 22 years old. I don't think he was quite as smooth as many others we've seen so far (Corn included) especially when it came to his timing, but we have a lot of him so we'll see him come into himself later. There were some rope-running bits that seemed weird, and he didn't stay down quite long enough to draw excitement for his comebacks. At one point, le Boulch put his head down and Corne dropkicked him head on and that didn't quite seem right. Despite Le Boulch getting plenty of heat, there weren't big pops for the head twists, for instance, which was out of the norm since the French crowd loved those. I thought Le Boulch was great. He's another in the line of those Jackie Gleason looking put upon, stooging heels. He was congenial enough in the beginning, pulling hair but offering handshakes, as if it was just a job, you know? When Corne started to get fiery, he started to get mean back. He had a lot of fun stuff, like tying Corne's shoelaces to the ropes and yanking on the other leg, of having a sequence where he missed a few dropkicks in a row. Probably the most memorable bit here was Corn dropkicking him into the ropes and following it up with a monkey flip repeatedly. It wasn't that the crowd disliked Corne, but the story of this one was le Boulch, his performance, and how he got under their skin by the end.

Roger Delaporte/Paul Villars vs. Yves Amor/Georges Gueret 9/5/59

SR:2/3 falls match going about 35 minutes. You look at this match up and you know exactly what you are getting. 4 guys who have no problem being bastards and trading massive beatings, doing just that. That being said, this had a pretty clever layout. Most of these matches start like a house of fire but kind of fail to build to an epic conclusion. Here they start slow with some fun wrestling and build really well to all hell breaking lose. We‘ve seen Amor & Gueret as heels before, but they work this pretty much as straight faces. All their shots come as retaliations to heel tactics from the mustached superduo of Delaporte/Villar. They won‘t do anything athletic, but they sure knew their way around the holds. There is a fun structure with the 1st fall ending early and much of the 2nd fall being spent working face in peril sections before Gueret and Amor are able to stage their comeback. Gueret once again looks pretty great here, he is great as a tough bad guy beating the shit out of good guys, and he is great as a tough good guy beating the shit out of bad guys, and the same goes for Amor really. The 3rd fall is pretty intense with some really great Mantell/Lawler feeling exchanges, including Amor and Delaporte beating the shit out of each other on the floor with the police having to get involved, and of course these guys were hitting each other so hard they make pretty much everyone in the world right now look like pussies. Delaporte deciding to take out Amors leg was another instance of his sudden brutal assaults that he has a real knack for. Another entry in the stream of great French tags.

MD: Another high quality 50s Delaporte tag. We've seen Gueret and Amor before, but they were both heels then. I thought they brought a lot in this role. Amor was relatively giant, but able to get down and wrestle. He had a lot of presence in general. Gueret had a tough, rugged look and for the most part, he backed it up. Villars was, as always, the perfect, resonant goon for Delaporte, and Delaporte, is basically the Satanico of France, if Satanico was 10% more a coward and a stooge. Rudo numero uno, basically, able to direct traffic, to beg off and prevaricate only to come back in with an earnest, merciless brutality. This one sung the loudest when they were dismantling Amor's leg, which was both well executed and made perfect story sense. Though it led to a transition as Gueret was able to convince he ref he tagged as he was breaking it up, the tandem STF was a thing of vicious beauty. Amor's selling was excellent and lingered on to the finish where he re-damaged his leg during the great brawling on the floor. Delaporte and friends walked the balance between conniving and opportunistic and outright dangerous exactly as a lead heel carrying a territory should.