Tuesday is French Catch Day: Corne! Bayle! DR. ADOLF KAISER! Strangler! Drapp! Vignal

MD: Couple of programming notes to start. First, we've been doing this for a couple of weeks more than a year now and I can't begin to tell you how great a part of my week this has been during these tough, isolated times. Thanks to everyone who has watched, commented, shared, and shown passion towards this project and this footage. We had no idea just how lucky we were going to be with it when we started. We could guess from what we already had, sure, but who knew that the week to week quality was going to be so high? That said, we're about to hit the dark period in the footage. Due to a cultural blowback, wrestling was much less frequently shown on TV between around this period and 1965. We still have a few scattered shows in 1961, then a handful of 1962 shows, just a couple of 63 ones, and only one for 64. It starts back up pretty steadily after that, and we've jumped ahead a couple of times to see that while different, everything's absolutely worth watching. That said, you can't help to be a little sad for what simply wasn't shown on TV for those missing years. Still, let's enjoy what we do have, including some really good ones this week.


Jacky Corne vs. Remy Bayle 4/14/61

MD: We get a good 25 minutes of this before it cuts out abruptly but it's well worth watching. This was right after Gagarin went into space and the announcer starts by referencing that which adds just a little bit of historical pinpointing to all of it. Just excellent stylist vs stylist stuff here, with Bayle younger and hungry. This had some of the best, most aggressive chain wrestling we've seen in a match like this, with each wrestler constantly trying to jock for position and escape holds and more effort than usual in the attempts to prevent escape (and there's usually a lot of effort so that's saying something). They even started with lockups instead of the usual double knucklelock/test of strength hand to hand entry points, which we haven't seen a ton of. Bayle went to the uppercuts first but Corn shut him down almost immediately with the leg nelson. They worked back up to more striking and Bayle followed with bodyscissors. They worked the intermission escape on that and then right back into it, then spent the rest of the match going between holds interspersed with spots and striking. It's a shape it cut off because if we had a finish on this, I could see it ranking pretty high for 1961. We get spatterings of Bayle all the way through the 80s, so it'll be interesting to see how he develops.

Jacques Bernieres vs. Jean Martin 4/21/61

MD: We get the last four minutes of this and it was pretty spirited. The announcer got confused which guy was which at the beginning, which messed me up too, but I'm pretty sure we come with Bernieres getting some revenge on Martin, who bumps and stooges big. The most memorable bit of this is Martin eating a back body drop over the top by the ref and after some good slugging and spots, Bernieres goes to the shoulder throw well one too many times and Martin hits him with a knee trembler. Post match, someone throws something (I think candy?) at Martin and he catches it and eats it, which is just brilliant stuff.

Andre Drapp/Bernard Vignal vs. Rocco Lambam/Dr. Adolf Kaiser 4/21/61

MD: Another week, another great tag. This is our first look at Kaiser in a while and I think our last look at him in general. Here he was spry and coy, emanating an air of gingerness that drew heat, even as he consistently worked to trap his opponent into his corner to lay in punishment. Lamban is, of course, El Strangulator. He has a dozen ways to strangle you (chinlock, cobra clutch, his finishing dragon sleeper, the very cool horizontal lift finger-into-throat when the ref can't see). Drapp and Vignal are a pretty perfectly paired tag team, with Vignal a little older but capable and fiery and Drapp one of those guys like Corn who have a real "ace" feel to them. Both can control on the mat, portray vulnerability, and come back strong. They took a huge chunk of this to start, but when you're wrestling two guys with strangleholds who can turn the match on a dime and then keep it turned due to chicanery and cutting off the ring, it more or less worked out.

PAS: The good doctor returns! Kaiser is one of my favorite characters in French Catch, and I love to see him sleaze around the ring. Cheapshotting, begging off, back jumping, all with that prim aristocratic affect. You can just see him walking into the farmhouse and drinking the fresh glass of milk. I love a strangler, and Rocco finds so many different ways to choke and torture, that lifting choke thing Matt mentioned was awesome. They are such a despicable pair. These weren't amazing babyface performance opposite them, but they did the job, delivered a beating when it was called for, added their own bag of tricks and were sympathetic victims. Match just kind of ended, without a big moment or two, which would have elevated it, but I wish we had another two dozen matches from Dr. Adolf and El Strangulator.  

SR: 2/3 Falls match over 30 minutes. The seemingly last appearance of the nefarious Dr. Adolf Kaiser. His partner here was Rocco Lamban, said to be a Spaniard. Lamban was another guy with a massive upper body and spindly arms and leopard trunks. If there‘s one thing to learn from old pro wrestling it‘s that guys in leopard trunks are likely douches. Lamban also knew how to finish people off with chokeholds. And that is what made this match really fun, as Dr. Kaiser & Lamban were constantly looking for a strangle hold, with Drapp & Vignal doing a lot of fun wrestling to squirm out of potential submissions. The animalistic behaviour of Dr. Kaiser is always highly entertaining, too. This developed into a quite intense beatdown on the faces. I‘ve been wondering whether the deal with Dr. Kaiser is similiar to the British deal that they wouldn‘t show his most violent matches on TV, but he and Lamban were surely and kicking ass full on here. I thought the match ended a little abruptly as it seemed to hint at the faces administering an epic counter-asskicking, but as it was it was a really fun romp.

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: McTiffin! Guettier! Mountourcy! Gastel! Mantopoulos! Ricetti!

Marcel Parmentier vs. Bob Plantain 6/19/59

MD: As always it's a travesty we don't have more Parmentier footage. He was such a nasty striker with a surly face and tons of heat. This is just a minute or two. No one in the footage is quite as big a tease.

James McTiffin vs. Roger Guettier 6/19/59

MD: McTiffin is Gwyn Davies, of the great Veidor match. He was working an affable Scottish giant gimmick here, kilt and bagpiper, and maybe didn't have quite all the pieces together yet. Guettier was mean and frustrated, full of high class comedy as he couldn't deal with McTiffin's size advantage. My favorite bit was a pumphandle armbar where he couldn't get any leverage and just gave up, but there was more. This went pretty short for 50s Catch, just around ten minutes, seeming to surprise everyone. Remember the first time you saw George Steele's flying hammerlock and how painful it looked? That was the finish here which was a flying double inverted knucklelock, which would only work given a size differential like this.

PAS: This was fun stuff, much more of a wacky comedy match then serious Catch. Guettier was flummoxed by the size of McTiffin, and had a bunch of different ways to seem flummoxed. That finishing flying knucklelock was awesome looking and totally redeemed McTiffin from otherwise seeming a bit stiff. Babatunde should steal that shit.


Sergio Reggiori vs Jacques Bernieres 6/19/59

MD: This was the TV time remaining bonus match after McTiffin made short work of Guettier and while it's cut off as they had to give the feed back to the station, what we get is actually very good. I get the sense that these two knew that this was their big chance to shine in front of a television audience and they really went at it hard. This included a few extended hanging-on-to-a-hold sequences, a lot of struggle, some aggressive shots, and at least one dive through the ropes on a missed charge. Unfortunately, I don't know if it did either of these guys any good because we don't see them a ton in the footage.


Claude Montourcy vs. Robert Gastel 6/26/59

MD: We'd seen Montourcy before, both in the Mann match, which was really mostly about Mann, and in the 60 minute match where he had a lot of interesting showcase moves. Here, though, it was all about him, working a judo gimmick with taped up feet instead of shoes. Gastel was the straight man here, throwing his headbutts and big bumps, and hairpulls, and yes, the tombstone. This was about Montourcy using his feet in odd ways (especially to escape) and having big takedowns and contorted stretches, including the one that kayfabe popped Gastel's shoulder out to end it, causing Montourcy's Japanese Professor (?) to come out to fix it. Also of not here was a wrestler at ringside, which, along with an overly exuberant fan, subtly distracted Gastel post-tombstone, which theoretically gave Montourcy time to come back. This was another short one like the week before.


Vasilios Mantopoulos vs. Roberto Ricetti 6/26/59

MD: Yet another high end lightweight match in the late 50s style, where they don't quite go as over the top with acrobatics as we'd see a few years later, but instead did a lot of what we've seen already faster and with more impact. Lots of long holds with reversals jammed (even the ones that might work elsewhere). Ricetti had some really great bridges. We had, I think, our first giant swing too. There were a couple of moments where they were almost going too hard to make things work (and I'm tempted to pin that more on Mantopolous, as great as he'd be later and as good as he still was here, but that may not be fair), but it didn't necessarily feel unnatural, just less smooth than it might have been. They were competing so hard that it didn't hurt the match at all. The finish was really strong, a perfect reversal to the idea of someone going to the well too many times.

SR: 1 fall match that goes a bit over 30 minutes. Mantopoulos is billed as Greek. We are going to see quite a bit of him. Ricetti is billed as Italian and this is about the only time he shows up. This was a clean match, no heel shenanigans, but the crowd was calling for them to throw European uppercuts, so both guys soon did that. They stuck to mostly basic holds, peppered with that French brand of athletic escape attempts. Mantopoulos wasn‘t as flamboyant and flashy as in later clips, but you could tell he was a wrestling machine. Ricetti looked good also, aside from seemingly not knowing how to bump for Mantopoulos headscissors. This was going solid and they worked in some surprisingly hot nearfalls, including an awesome O‘Connor Roll and some plausible rope running exchanges later. Great finish, too. The thing that stands about these guys running the ropes and hitting improbable moves is not the athleticism, but the great sense of timing.

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