Tuesday is French Catch Day: Magnier! Plantin! Bordeaux! Pereira! Di Santo! Chaisne!

8/7/76

Bob Plantin vs. Fred Magnier

MD: Three matches on this show, with the second one being brand new and the first and third being new to us. They were on, coincidentally, Bob Plantin's YouTube channel. We get about 8 minutes JIP here. Plantin is quite young. Magnier is rather pigfaced in a good way for a heel. He's a former firefighter and called the legionnaire since he was apparently in the Legion for five years. Delaporte is the ref looking casual. They say he's 47 but he looks like he's 47 going on 67 with all the grey. 

Plantin was full of energy. While he sold with his whole body and flopped about sympathetically and then came back with fiery (even if he didn't hit nearly as hard as Magnier), I do think maybe he did too much too often, zooming out of the ring, doing a taupie escape without the build, going through Magnier's legs, etc. There was one great bit I don't remember ever seeing before where he went for a cross headscissors but sort of rode through with it into a roll up exchange. Eventually Magnier leaned on him too much and ignored Delaporte too much and they started scrapping but by then Plantin had an injured ear and Delaporte called the match. This would have been better if he called the match first and then when Magnier didn't let up, they THEN scrapped. Here the drama was backwards.

Antonio Pereira vs. Jean-Claude Bordeaux

MD: This went about ten minutes but it was an incredibly skillful ten minutes. Pereira is billed as Portuguese and Bordeaux we've seen in tags with Francis Louis. Both of them were lighter and they could absolutely go. They kept it mostly gentlemanly though Pereira was the aggressor. Bordeaux had a counter for everything though. Lots of sharp hanging on to holds and through throws, though nothing was worked for long as they kept things moving. Sharp headscissors and a 'rana and some very slick ways to land on one's feet. I'm not sure how much of it was Pereira's basing but Bordeaux looked extremely sharp. About two thirds through, Pereira started to lean down upon him a bit more, maybe apologetically, but definitively nonetheless. Despite that, Bordeaux was able to leap up to the top rope and then come flying back with a body press for the win. Definitely a good one to check out if you just have ten minutes to see just how good these guys were at what they did.

Michel Chaisne vs. Michel Di Santo

MD: This is a very late look at Chaisne who we haven't seen since the early 60s if I'm not mistaken. He's got grey hair and seems to be in charge of sports for some town or another as his day job. This is our earliest look at Lino's son Michel. It's twenty minutes or so (a little less) and it's very good. Chaisne had grey hair but he could still go, still knew all the tricks, still had all the technique. The start of the match had Di Santo whipping him around with his arm or his neck on these tight takeovers and they all looked brutal. Lots of hard hitting shots as well, with Di Santo bumping into the top rope throat first after one and Chiasne crashing into Delaporte (the ref here) and even over the top at one point. That gave us more extracurriculars as Magnier, in the crowd after the first match got into it with Chaisne and got routed out the other side of the ring for his trouble.

They didn't overtly play up the young vs old as much as you think, leaning instead into technique and hard shots. It did seem like Chaisne controlled the holds a bit more and had more answers, even if Di Santo was happy to move with energy and give him problems. Finish had both of them sailing over the top and the crowd helping Chaisne back into the ring first for the countout. This made me wish we had another fifteen years of Chaisne matches basically.

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: Manneveau! Le Samurai! More Luna Catch 2000! Cavilliers! Fontaine!

Guy Cavilliers vs. Alain Fontaine 1/3/72

MD: This is a rare episode that seems to be joined well in progress. We only have about ten minutes of this, with no entrances and some talk with Fontaine's family at the end. I do think we've only come in a few minutes late though. The first few minutes of this are the two of them tossing each other out, with  Fontaine getting the better of it and his younger opponent coming back. Once they get going there are a lot of headscissors takeovers and dropkicks though it's a little disjointed relative to what we're used to maybe. The finish has both of them missing dropkicks and then kipping up to crash into one another, a way for the younger wrestler to earn a draw and a novel finish even if one that you don't want to repeat too much. 

Marcel Manneveau vs. Le Samurai 1/31/72

MD: Interesting match. I have no idea who Le Samurai was. Apparently he had red gear with a red and yellow mask. Some of the things he did, like the bowing and chops, and most notably the hangman's neckbreaker where he carries his opponent to the ropes and presses up into them from underneath neck-first were parts of the Kamikazes' game, but other things weren't, and the general style of wrestling seemed different. The first ten minutes, before he devolved into the chops and nerve-holds, had some really good mat wrestling, a lot of wrist control and counters to counters. Occasionally they got overambitious and lost something. Samurai had one absolutely brilliant escape from a headscissors where he brought up his own legs to hold one of Manneveau's. As such, this was a great showcase for just how good Manneveau was on the mat, which we often don't get to see in dirty Blousons matches. Once the match opened up, both guys played the heel, though the fans were more against Samurai than they were for Manneveau. My favorite bits here were Samurai's killer double leg stump pullers, but also some of the abrupt grabbing of limbs that almost made it seem like a 1970s proto-shoot style. The finish was kind of gnarly as Samurai had Manneveau trapped in a sunset flip pin and scored the three despite Manneveau repeatedly slamming his heel against Samurai's head to try to escape. Good match even with the affectations.  

Antonio Pereira/Mota Dos Santos vs. Francis Louis/Jean Claude Bordeaux 1/31/72

MD: Yes, this is more Luna Catch 2000, where wrestler are shot into the ring off platforms with compressed air. I'm fairly certain that this 6 minutes or so that we get (more like 10 with the pomp and circumstance to begin) is actually the debut as the full match that has gotten more attention than maybe anything else we've posted is from April and we're at the end of January here. They started this with the klaxon and the cosmic bowling lights, with wrestlers dressed in silver jumpsuits but no helmets this time and with a countdown to launch them into the ring which was different. The commentator likened it to a scene from a Kubrick movie. We've got the same wrestlers as before, but I think they had the act down just a bit more in April as they were better at both not bumping on their own backs on the way in and also catching themselves then. I don't know what else to tell you. Having seen the week after week quality of the footage, this stuff is a fun novelty but if I had to choose, I'm glad we got the full Manneveau vs Samurai match and just a few minutes of watching these guys soar into the ring, land, pause and then armdrag or slam each other. Basically, while it's cool Bryan Danielson is talking about this sort of thing on a podcast, I'd rather see (and would rather he see!) another Louis/Bordeaux vs Dos Santos/Pereira match without the compressed air and ten foot high bumps than this, as they are pretty spectacular when they get to put together an actual match.

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: Arroyo! Husberg! Dos Santos! Louis! Bordeuax! Payen!

Jose Arroyo vs. Eric Husberg 12/27/57

SR: 1 Fall match going about 35 minutes. This was a bit „hot and cold“, but when it got hot, it got hot. Arroyo is a bald headed Spaniard who gets to be the face in this, while Husberg is your typical heel of the era who will wrestle a bit only to forearm you in the back of the head unexpectedly. The wrestling was basic but servicable, of course the juicy parts are when they start trading blows. Arroyo has really great looking european uppercuts and I liked how Husberg looked just disgusted with Arroyos retaliations. Heels thinking faces should be above their tactics is great. This also had a ref stop finish, which I believe is a first in this footage.

MD: This was a good match and had a invested crowd that seemed much more into cheering for Arroyo (who was presented as a handsome Yul Brenner sort here) than booing Husberg. In some ways, it's not bad that this match finishes 1957 for us because it was very typical for the brunt of face vs heel matches we saw during the year. They had a couple minutes of clean wrestling before Husberg got frustrated and laid in the blows. He controlled with holds and cheapshots behind the ref's back and Arroyo came back with technical reversals and punishing blows. If we had watched this four or five months ago, it'd have stood out. Really, though, it was a lesser version of a lot of what we've seen. I wouldn't call it lifeless: Arroyo was fiery when he ought to have been, almost always going farther and more violent than other faces we've seen and Husberg had this passive aggressive attitude where he seemed put upon and almost annoyed to be in this situation and he certainly was invested in the cheating. Arroyo's offense just wasn't as crisp or interesting even if the crowd was going wild for the sheer depth of violence in his comebacks or the finish and Husberg just didn't have the verve as a Tony Oliver or Pellacani; he came off as subdued, pissy or stoic. He did the right things, but they weren't nearly as enjoyable to watch as usual. Which again, might have been ok for a shorter JIP affair, but we had 38 minutes, straight with no fall breaks, of this one.

PAS: I agree with Matt that this would have stood out a lot more earlier in this project, we have seen too much elite stuff for very good to register. It is also a lot to ask to invest nearly 40 minutes in two guys with out a ton of real flash. I thought there were a couple of standout mat spots, including Arroyo rolling a leg lock into a bridge pin, and Arroyo was laying in the shots, including a finish where the ref had to stop the match (although it also looked like Husberg may have legit messed up his shoulder.) Still this need more to justify the time invested in watching it.


Mota Dos Santos/Pierre Payen vs. Francis Louis/Jean Claude Bordeuax 6/19/71

SR: JIP 2/3 Falls match going about 25 minutes. 3/4 of these guys did the insane moon wrestling match a year later. I wanted to see what they could do in a regular match. The answer was a pretty standard match that ended up being pretty fun. Dos Santos & Payen act as heels, stooging and cutting off the ring.. While they don't do anything super evil besides kicking a few people when they're down they gathered tremendous heat. The wrestling won't blow you away if you've been watching the French stuff, but it was the kind of fun solid light weight action nearly everyone can enjoy. The standout was easily Mota Dos Santos. He was really fun even just threatening to swing punches. He also had a great mlitary press and a a nice German Suplex (probably the first time we've seen one in this footage). I also noticed how insanely stocky is for the first time here which makes his fast movements look even more awesome. True to form, this is the only regular match this mysterious supposedly Portuguese wrestler ends up showing up in.

MD: We only have two dos Santos matches. One is the space catch with the trampolines. Here's the other. It was much more grounded and much better for it. They still moved quickly. They still did fantastic stuff. There were a ton of bumps to the floor off of dropkicks, lots of slugfests, tons of headscissors takedowns and clever rope running. Dos Santos bounded into the ring every time he was tagged and had a cool little rolling dodge at times (including to get heat after a fall so he didn't have to start the next one). But it was a much cleaner and clearer heel vs face narrative with cutting off the ring and build to some real payoff for the faces getting revenge. Dos Santos' normal partner was out with a knee injury; I get the sense Payen was normally a face but he comported himself excellently as a heel here, with lots of mean blows, cheating the first moment we see him with a hairpull to the outside. Robert Charron, who had been a boxing champion in the 60s was the ref but he wasn't a huge factor, only getting involved once or twice. Bordeaux played face in peril for a lot of this with Louis really dynamic on his comebacks with just huge uppercuts. There were some spectacular individual moves, like dos Santo's crazy dangling German Suplex and the press-slam gut punch combo that finished the first fall, and quite a bit of heat, much, much more than we had for the trampoline match. The biggest highlight was probably the wild brawl on the floor. I thought the finish was just a little flat because it was too similar to how the faces won the second fall, but in the end, this was a great combination of flash and substance.

PAS: I thought this was a blast, did a great job of melding the super athletic style of French wrestling with the more smash mouth stuff. Dos Santos was the stand out, a pint sized power guy throwing awesome looking press slams and german suplexes, and still whipping out super fast headscissors. Louis was a great hot tag, really coming in and steamrolling people. The brawl on the outside was super heated, they were wildly tossing hands and even shoving fans in the crowd. I would have also liked to see a more dynamic finish, but that was really a quibble, overall I thought this was just excellent.

ER: Loved this, total superstar performance from Dos Santos, but everyone had their moments. Either Dos Santos just had this real improbable strength, or Bordeaux is a master of body manipulation and making himself fly. Now, both of these things could be true. We've seen the acrobatics these guys can pull off and it's some real Cirque du Soleil kinda jazz, crazy body manipulation leading to unnatural feats of strength. And here's Dos Santos doing one of the most impressive and unexpected press slams I can ever remember seeing. He was running around the ring with Bordeaux like he was Bigelow deciding which part of the crowd to throw Spike into, except he's barely bigger than Spike. Bordeaux has a real beautiful headscissors and I'm glad he got to show it off a few times here. It's one of those optical illusion headscissors where he leaps up high enough to grab guys in a huracanrana but falls back to earth and snares them at the last minute with his ankles. It always looks like he's going to whiff or he just missed a dropkick, and then at the very last moment he hooks those ankles. It's so good. Bordeaux clearly has next level body control and it's one of the things that makes me want to see Dos Santos pull off a similarly impressive press slam with someone the same size as Bordeaux, but not Bordeaux's weigh distribution talent. The crowd brawl really stood out as it's not something we've seen a ton of here. We've had guys take wild bumps over the top and into the close seated fans, but this was a cool spirited brawl with guys throwing in a tight space. It's more jarring to see that in what is a much more professional setting, the same way you don't see World of Sport crowd brawls in front of mums in their house coats. Great stuff.

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: Louis! Bordeaux! Perero! Dos Santos! Oliver! Iska Khan!

Iska Khan vs. Jim Oliver 2/1/57

SR: JIP 1 fall match with about 20 minutes shown. Iska Khan was the child of Mongolian parents and born in former Yugoslavia in 1924. He was also an actor and even has a French Wikipedia page. He is introduced as the Tibetan champion here, while Jimmy Oliver is introduced as the champion of Spain. French wrestling was quite diverse. This was in the same style as the previous match between Inca Peruano and Joachim La Barba, a mix of wrestling and two guys beating the shit out of each other. There is an art to beating on each other for 20 minutes and making it good, and they had it down. Jimmy Oliver, a former boxer, had the vibe of a hard as nails guy who will really hurt you, and he had some big bumping and awesome selling. Considering that is something you can say about most of these 1950s heels working France, it really says something about how amazing the talent at the time was. Khan was working barefoot and hitting chops and nerve holds, which was a fun breath of fresh air, and he was really chopping the shit out of Oliver's neck here, he also had some amusing ways to torture his opponent. Iska works this match as the babyface and the crowd is really into him. There was some fun wrestling, although nothing super athletic or graceful. Oliver was pretty awesome to watch, he makes basic holds look really violent, and he had some really nasty knees, at one point he throws a punch combo to the body that had the referee jumping on him. The strike exchanges here were really awesome and stand out to someone watching this in 2020. These days it seems most wrestlers idea of strike exchanges seems to take turns hitting each other and making angry faces, these guys tearing into each other is on a completely different level. Khan was just chopping his opponent silly which lead to some awesome wobbly selling from Oliver, and Oliver come across as a total prick. The finish is a big move that you would expect a 1980s powerhouse to do, it comes a bit out of nowhere and I would‘ve liked to see these two guys kill each other for a little longer because it was awesome to watch. This is probably the most "standard“ of all the French matches we‘ve seen so far, it was simple but they totally nailed it.

MD: One of my favorite matches we've watched so far. Some of that is due to a sort of familiarity/standardness, sure, but I think a lot of it was the contrast. Khan was full of affectation, the honorable easterner character, down to the robe and the bowing shtick with Oliver and everyone else at the end. That said, he was still that character plucked and placed into 50s France, where everything was technically sound and they had a penchant of beating the everloving crap out of each other. He went back to the nerve hold but he did so in a looming, competent manner that the fans kept popping for (he literally went "over the top" with it, coming in over Oliver's guard). Some of that is that we never see it as a babyface hold that heels have to work in and out of. I sort of love how we're seeing example after example of mean, surly "heels," most of which I'm sympathetic to because we share hairlines. Oliver was no exception. He would occasionally get clowned or outgunned (chopped in this case) by Khan and would sell it with the height of sharp indignity, but when he came back it was brutal, stretching him, hitting a killer backbreaker/knee drop combo onto the back, and the explosive finishing stampede that maybe could have used just a bit more set up. We've got Khan vs. Bollet from a year or two later down the road and I'm really looking forward to that.

PAS: This was my favorite match we have gotten from this new batch. This is basically a WAR heavyweight match, the 1950s French version of Takashi Ishikawa vs. a more agile Ashura Hara. Khan has the best and nastiest judo chop's I have ever seen and I love judo chops. It is really fun to see a nerve hold as a babyface spot, and he really digs into the traps. Oliver takes a couple of great looking bumps into the crowd and has some really nasty looking knees to the head and body, and great punches, there are a couple of punch/chop exchanges which felt like Johnny Valentine stuff. We get a little more Khan in this stuff, but no more Oliver, one of the coolest things about this stuff is seeing guys show up you have never seen or heard of before, and instantly have new favorites.

ER: Who among us could have predicted French wrestling from 60+ years ago would look like this? I watched The Red Balloon in school, that was from the exact same period, and this surely felt like a France not seen. This really did feel like a WAR singles match, with a smaller babyface Killer Khan vs. one of Tenryu's stable of killers. The stiffness kept ramping up as the match went on, with Oliver's shots to Khan's jaw so mean that I kept expecting Khan to wilt, and instead he would fire back with full open handed chops to Oliver's head, face, and neck. These were Baba chops that would have put Baba (clearly a teen in attendance) in the hospital. Oliver is really fantastic at taking big reckless bumps into the ropes, really placing all trust in them not breaking as he plunges into and through them into the crowd. He went into the crowd twice and that's always such a strong visual for me, and here the crowds are so close to the ring that he is essentially crowd surfing on men in suits. It's perfect. There's a fantastic spot that I have never seen before, that somebody really needs to steal: on a sunset flip, Oliver traps Khan's legs, holding Khan's legs so that Khan's calves are touching the back of his own thighs, and it looked absolutely impossible to get out of. So far I am undefeated in finding something in these French matches that I have never seen anywhere else.


Francis Louis/Jean Claude Bordeaux vs. Antonio Perero/Mota Dos Santos 4/24/72

SR: Weirdest damn thing I‘ve ever seen. They‘ve got springs at ringside and using them to catapult the wrestlers into the ring at incredible heights. I can‘t find words to do it quite justice. Before the match, both teams come out dressed as corny sci fi movie astronauts while early electronic music blares. Amazing. Tags are signaled by raising a fist and the tag in, the other wrestler catapults into the ring. To make things even weirder, the match has rounds, which I‘ve never seen in a tag match. Perero & Dos Santos were announced as „Portuguese“ but that may not be true at all. Aside from the insane gimmick, the wrestling wasn‘t blow away, although there were a few beautiful armdrags and headscissors. All these guys moved slick as cats. Seems they couldn‘t focus much due to having to do all these jumps while trying not to blow their knees out. They actually didn‘t use the catapults for many moves, though there is the crazy spot where one guy catches the other flying and hits a body slam, not something I would‘ve believed possible before seeing this. Also, guys kept bumping on their back while flying into the ring and they just got up and kept moving. How am I supposed to buy a body slam as a finisher after seeing that? Anyways, this felt like a true crossover of wrestling and acrobatics. I‘m sure a couple AAA guys could do way more with the insane gimmick, but that would be riddled with thigh slapping moves, Canadian Destroyers and backcrackers. What we got here was classier, basically Catch in Space, and it was fairly nice.

PAS: I remember seeing clips of either this match, or another match like it before, but it is nutso that we actually got to see it in full. The Portuguese team doesn't seem to show up again, and I am now wondering if every match in Portugal is a springs match, and this was the 70s French equivalent of one of those ROH Dragon Gate six man tags. All the actual in ring wrestling was pretty cool, working that fast headscissors and armdrags style, including a great short arm scissors exchange, although it was hard for the match to have any structure with guys being flung into the ring. The catapult was really high, they just flew 20 feet into the air before landing in the ring, several times guys would take flat back bumps off of the catapult and jump up, and it hurt the wrestling physics in my brain, it was basically a superplex off a cage with the guy bounding up.  This isn't going to be the best thing we find in this footage, but it is the damndest thing for sure.

MD: Your poor disbelief watching this and all of the back bumps (and their poor backs!). In some ways, I'm glad this wasn't the first bit of footage that was uncovered. If we had gotten this before Cesca or Catanzaro popped up, I think we'd be blind to the failings. Instead, even with the novelty, we can see the cracks. I've been thinking what might have been changed to make this work and here's what I came up with: flip it. They started out with a feeling out process, moved on to a bit more control and build to place the middle falls, and then finished with a fireworks grand finale of guys flying in one after the other towards the draw. It's not that there wasn't some sense of escalation or struggle. For instance, the second round told a story of French control which ended with the round break and was followed by the quick Portuguese pin off of the impressive flying catch, so it was possible. So flip it. If they had started hot and then slowly showed the cost of it all with increasingly less frequent tags and the act of getting into the ring shown as making one vulnerable (which they do sort of play to at the end here), they could have made this resonate much more. Ah well. As for individual performances, it was hard at times to keep track. Dos Santos was impressively agile and seemed to do the best flips into the ring, if that is a new metric for us now; and the stuff at 18:40 might be the single most beautiful exchange we've seen since starting this project. Everyone should go out and gif it and promulgate it on the internet now. Past that, watch a few minutes of the last round and then go and watch the Khan match instead.

ER: I thought this was brilliant. Imagine if you saw this live when you were a kid. How magical must this have seemed? I was taken to events when I was a kid. I went to baseball games, and Sesame Street Live, and the Harlem Clowns (I think a feeder system for the Globetrotters) play local cops and firefighters, and the circus, and the Beach Boys playing Reno with John Stamos actually sitting in on drums. So I saw some shit, pal. Brother I've stood right next to one of those big metal globes that have two guys daredevil riding their motorcycles around really fast just inches from each other. But imagine seeing this? Your whole world would have changed. What else have you, presumably an adult, ever seen like this? But imagine watching this with a child's eyes. Look at how high up in the air these men are crashing from, over and over with no break. Phil said it looked like 20 feet! Imagine what Phil's 20 feet looked like to an 8 year old! This feels more like a 30 minute feature you would find on a new Criterion Collection blu ray, an unearthed documentary of the acrobat wrestlers of Portugal. Where are these men? What happened to their bodies? How long did they have to practice to get the confidence to repeatedly dive into an empty pool for half and hour? I have so many questions and none of us are ever going to have answers to any single one of them. We may be able to piece together loose trends or guesses, but we won't ever really know any of the hows or whats of this. And how beautiful is that? This is a treasure that we have unearthed from a forgotten time capsule, no way of contacting any human being who would have witnessed this spectacle live. This felt beamed from another galaxy. Incomparable.

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