Tuesday is French Catch Day: Drapp! Vignal! de Lasartesse! Duranton! Rene Ben! Daidone!

Andre Drapp & Bernard Vignal vs. Jack de Lasartesse & Robert Duranton 1/20/61

SR: 2/3 falls match. We get about 40 minutes. Unfortunately, the third fall seems to be missing. Then again, it seems before we only had the 1st fall of this match. This was a tremendously entertaining affair, mostly thanks to the heel supertandem of Lasartesse/Duranton. These two had to be the most pompous tag team in all of wrestling at this point. There‘s certainly no two wrestlers who embody the „nasty european“ type like they did. Every moment of the match was characterized by their mannerisms, outrageous bumping, and vicious tactics. Not to disparage the faces in this match. Vignal is another very solid wrestler, who really makes his uppercuts and dropkicks look great, and Drapp is of course great, but this was one where you couldn‘t take your eyes off Duranton and Lasartesse. Durantons diva like antics and struts were especially spectacular. They also had Durantons valet with them, who at one point confronts the ring announcer and gets the shit slapped out of him with policemen jumping into the scene in an awesome moment. He gets involved in the match more and eventually thrown around like his big boys in the ring. Gotta say, Lasartesses knee drops have to be among the best ever in wrestling. He just drops right on their throat. No idea how he doesn‘t kill the guy. Too bad about the missing ending, because this felt as fresh as anything in the last 60 years.

MD: First, sorry but this one can't go up, at least not in full. Our archivist friends have a minute of Couderc swiping at the valet online that's frazzling any attempt at it. I tried. I'm sure I'll work it out eventually and someday you'll have that to look forward to. We're still going to talk about it to keep the historical record up. Duranton and Lasartesse are a natural pairing, with the valet looking after both. In a lot of ways Lasartesse (billed as living in the US now with a love of chewing gum) as a larger version of Duranton. It creates a sort of big dog/little dog vibe with Duranton giving us his best, most entertaining performance yet, craven, cowardly, cheap-shotting, just completely over the top. There's a spot where he gets caught in the stylist corner and dives through their legs to make a tag, which if done by the good guys, would have gotten adulation instead of jeers and laughs. He draws a ton of heat, not just from the crowd, but also from the other wrestlers. At one point, Vignal sacrifices a chance at the advantage to go after him on the apron because he had such a great trash talk game. We haven't really seen that so thoroughly in this footage so far. Lasartesse utilizes his size and reach advantage so well, including just leaning on guys or taking them over with his headlock suplex. He has that lead heel way of always fighting back, even when he's getting clowned, which is one of those things you'll see in guys like Ultimo Guerrero that subconsciously gets over their toughness and primacy to the crowd. They have some good double team stuff including a tandem backbreaker and their finishing move of a power body slam followed by a knee drop off the top. Vignal had spent the last few years in Canada and he's older but fiery, with a lot of great striking comebacks and bits of punishment that the crowd gets behind. Drapp's less of a factor ring-time-wise but he has a few good escapes as always. Narratively, there are a couple missed opportunities for limbwork control and hot tags, but no one really cares because it was all so entertaining and heated and they got to see the heels pinballed around and the valet used as a projectile weapon in the end.

Rene Ben Chemoul vs Giuseppe Daidone 3/10/61

MD: At this stage of the footage, it's always good to see wrestlers we're familiar with because it helps reaffirm what we've learned so far and because some of these guys have become favorites already, but that probably pales a little to the chance of seeing some new historical figure for the first time. Daidone, for instance, is a guy we don't know a ton about, but one thing we do know about him is that he lost his beard against Blue Demon in Mexico City in 1955. If you're going to know one thing about a guy, that's a hell of a thing to know. That probably colored how I saw him here a bit. He was a base and a heavy for Ben Chemoul. While he had great looming presence and really laid in knees from a few different directions and was quick to lean on Ben Chemoul or keep him down with repeated hairpulls, he was really there to make his opponent shine. And did Ben Chemoul ever shine here. He got to show off all of his great escapes and takedowns. He'd have these three or four motion set-ups (either a point or a feint or a roll or sometimes the combination of the three). Instead of hairpulls, he'd use facewipes to keep holds. Everything he did was a combination of small leverage set ups and big visual payoffs. Stuff we've seen out of Ben Chemoul before, like his torpedo in the corner, was over the top great here. They used repetition well, either with a rule of three full nelson smash in the corner or to set up the finish by having Daidone crush him with a corner whip only to get reversed on the second and go sailing into the crowd to set up the count out. Stylist vs stylist matches will always be fun but a stylist vs a solid base match is always going to shine up the babyface best.

PAS: Chemoul has such a charm to him, he comes off really likable, and Daidone is a nice foil for that charm. Chemoul actually brings the nasty first with a bunch of sick looking leg scrapes across Daidone's eyes. Daidone wasn't as flashy as some of the heels we have seen before but hat some good looking forearms and stomps and was a good dance partner for Chemoul's fanciness. He also took a big enough bump to the floor that I bought the countout finish, which is to his credit. Chemoul is one of the real high end guys in this footage, and this was a nice addition to his dance card.