Tuesday is French Catch Day: Prince! Mitchell! Noced! Renault! Schmid! James!

Daniel Noced/Guy Renault vs Petit Prince/Alan Mitchell 10/12/74

MD: Really, really good stuff here. Look, Petit Prince is having a moment this last week due to a big viral tweet. I do hope that when that happens people find their way to the blog and the master list so that they can watch this footage for themselves. There's so much more than just gifs of highspots to these matches. Everyone that's been following along knows that. Spread the word! (And because I haven't linked to it for a while, here's the Master List, updated as of a month or two ago: http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2021/05/french-catch-tuesday-master-list.html)

Ok, so this was excellent. Two things became very clear to me from watching it. Most importantly, Noced is the Psicosis to Prince's Rey Mysterio, Jr. He's the perfect base for him, able to take all of his stuff, able to beat him down when it's time, over the top with a red mane of curly hair and beard that the black and white doesn't do justice. He knows all of Prince's stuff and can play into it perfectly. The second is that Mitchell is really Prince's perfect partner. He's a technical brit who knows all the tricks and is all about the close-up magic of tiny bits of limb and joint manipulation. It's perfect contrast for Prince's sweeping acrobatics. This is the only match we have with them as a conventional team and they're just so perfect together.

Mitchell is very close to the top of the list of someone that I wish was in another ten matches. He has ways of clowning his opponent that no one else in France was doing. Bits where he bodyscissors them so they have to walk around the ring with him attached or traps their arms or legs with his arms. There was an exchange where Renault was trapped and it was all he could do not to fall over and Renault kept coming in to pick him up and Prince would come in to knock him back down. The fans loved it. Renault was totally game but Noced was the star in how mean he'd hit and how smug he was after escaping one thing or another (including the ref pulling his ears) only to slip on a banana peel or get his comeuppance from a stylist a moment later.

This had about fifteen minutes of the stylists mostly outwrestling the bad guys, including a great long short arm scissors by Prince on Noced where he was going back and forth with it like a rowboat as the fans chanted, and all of the lift ups/rolls that you'd expect. That led to a brief but awesome bit of heat once Noced was finally able to place him on the top rope. Because of his diminutive size, Prince could really get sympathy bumping into the crowd and getting knocked off the apron. This led to a great earned comeback by Prince and one of the best hot tags I think I've seen in French catch to end the first fall. The second fall was mainly fun and celebratory but led to a ref bump and guest Ring Announcer Jean Robic (a former Tour de France winner) coming in to count the fall to a big ovation. Just great stuff all around. Mitchell/Prince is one of the greatest one-match teams we have on tape.

PAS: Tremendous stuff, Prince is so great in every match he is in, it is hard to rank them. This feels like a high end Prince match, as we have a great pair of rudos, and Mitchell adding his own spice to the mix. Loved all of the stuff with Mitchell's drop toe hold and his weird body scissors. I am a short arm scissors mark, and this was a very cool variation of that spot. The Tour de France guy coming in to make the pin was a fun bit of old school pro-wrestling business, I love a good celebrity appearance, and it is fun to see  a guy who was a big deal fifty years ago but is lost to history now. 

Al-Casi vs Christian Preno 4/13/75

MD: Hey, we're in color now. Stylist vs stylist match that goes a little over ten minutes. Al Casi was 26, Preno was 23. This feels like the French version of a young lions match and it's probably extremely interesting to compare/contrast vs that or a first match on a mid-south card in 83, that sort of thing. Casi was obviously more experienced but Preno was very willing and there was never a moment where they weren't scrapping and trying for holds or escapes or mares or throws and occasionally even shots as it came close to boiling over in the middle before it calmed back down. I wouldn't want to watch these sorts of matches week in and week out at the expense of everything else, but you can't fault their effort here.

Daniel Schmid vs Rocky James 4/13/75

MD: This is just a bizarre scene. We didn't have anything from the end of 74 or the first few months of 75 and thus we're in April here, in color, and I'm not really sure what to make of this. James came out with bagpipers and an accordion player. Schmid had definitely been a heel before. Neither of them played nice. Both were bigger guys with big shots and a lot of aggression. James felt like a de facto face who did heelish things (snuck in a single leg from the ground, played king of the mountain in an unsportsmanlike way, wouldn't break clean, kept getting admonished by the ref) but expected to be cheered for them and sort of did. He reminded me a bit of Otto Wanz actually. Schmid, as always, reminds one of Buddy Rose with his pudgy speed and literal baby face reactions. This never really came together but that just gave everything a more competitive feel. Past a fairly long armbar early where James kept control through a lot of escape attempts, you never quite felt comfortable as a viewer with this one. It was good action with bigger guys but not wildly coherent, even as the band kept playing in the background and the crowd just seemed happy that they were hitting each other.

SR: 1 Fall match going a bit under 25 minutes. This was a match between two guys with fantastic physique. I love that Schmid was like a mini Greg Valentine while Rocky James looked like a more stocky Jerry Lawler. The first 10 minutes of this were pretty much a study of upper body holds and throws which these guys executed at blinding speed. After that Schmid tags James with a punch to the jaw and the match turns into a potatoefest. Schmid looked grizzly here, bowling James out of the ring when he tried a leg stretch and then putting on a nasty Fuchi stretch of his own while stepping on James face. The crowd seemed confused about who the face was, so James made sure to be a bastard and clubbed Schmid hard with nasty forearms and punt kicks. I loved all the body shots that were thrown and the back and forth european uppercuts were some of the funniest we‘ve seen with both guys aiming at the jaw. Basically a mix of really fun wrestling and hard hitting by two barrel chested dudes who look like truck drivers.