Tuesday is French Catch Day: Van Buyten! Bollet! Delaporte! Mr. Montreal! de Zarzecki!

Andre Bollet vs. Franz van Buyten 1969

MD: As we'd already covered the Andre match from 68, here's our first real look in this chronological process at Franz Van Buyten in a nice long 2/3 falls singles match with Bollet. They were doing something weird here where the commentating was for the crowd. I say this a lot with Bollet, but this felt like another iconic match-up. Van Buyten is an amazing seller, one of the best ever, maybe, at drawing sympathy, at full body selling, selling of exhaustion and damage, and drawing the crowd into his big, righteous comebacks. And Bollet, of course, portrays one of the biggest shitbag jerks ever, who despite his obvious talent, which here includes a nice up and over counter, an Indian Deathlock, the somersault senton that ends the first fall, deserves everything he gets. Unlike some of the 2/3 falls tags we've seen lately, this felt perfectly balanced, with a very hard-worked, gritty feeling out period to start, with Bollet starting to cheat and Van Buyten firing back, leading to a nice bit of heat as Bollet kept tossing Van Buyten out, one that got so heated that they brought in someone from the crowd (maybe a weird plant) who took his shirt off and brandished a cane, and then a big comeback in the second fall, with plenty of revenge spots with Bollet tied up, before they went more even (though with a clear Van Buyten advantage) towards the banana peel finish and the post-match brawling. This was a beloved hero against a terrible villain and everything you'd want along those lines.

SR: On paper this should've been good, but in practice this was really long. It seems Bollet was past it at this point. He could still hit hard, but was struggling to kill time when controlling the action. Van Buyten always sells big and makes stuff look hard fought, but in this case the match took forever to get anywhere. We eventually got the signature Van Buyten comeback. Miserable ending. At least we got to see Van Buyten slug it out with Bollet on the floor. That was more exciting than anything that came before.

PAS: I am closer to Matt than Sebastian on this one. I thought it was pretty great with Bollet being really brutal, landing senton's so nasty that Van Buyten seemed to be nearly puking, hard forearms and uppercuts. We had the wildness of a fan (or plant) running in and some really heated Van Buyten comebacks at the end. I am into the idea of a babyface getting so fired up that he crotches the heel on the top rope, only to realize he went too far. 

Andre Bollet/Roger Delaporte vs Mr. Montreal/Warnia de Zarzecki 1/25/69

MD: We'd seen this tag a few years earlier, but here everyone's a little older, and excitingly enough, the match is in color. I can't say the color adds all that much, though. Delaporte looks a little greyer, maybe. The crowd seems a little more vivid on close-ups. The ring apron is very red. And this match follows many others we've seen, a long first fall with the back half full of heat and two short falls of babyface supremacy to make up for it. Bollet and Delaporte are, of course, masters of controlling the ring and they show that here. They'll get outwrestled and outpunched by their opponents but all it'll take is one moment to get control of things in their own corner once again. They played up Delaporte's age a bit more now, though he was old when he was young, always writhing and wincing even though he'd hit like a truck. Bollet seemed as athletic as ever, able to hit those somersault sentons and go up and over to escape a hold, plus bumping and stooging all around the ring and getting in fights with random members of the crowd (and here, the camera crew as well). We know Montreal and Zarzecki were good and they seemed it here even if they didn't stand out (even in their own usual ways like Montreal's strength) relative to other stylist teams we've seen lately.

SR: 2/3 falls match going about 30 minutes. This was in color. It kind of made you wonder, where the other matches from the time period also in colour and this was just the only one that happened to get archived in color? Or were they testing the technology here? Eitherway, the match wasn't much special. Some gnarly heel beatdowns and technico control segments, but nothing you haven't seen in better tags. Warnia and Mr. Montreal seemed somewhat subdued. Bollet and Delaporte still made for a decent heel tandom, at least. The last 2 falls were microscopic and I had to wonder if the match would've been better in more evenly spread out form.