Tuesday is French Catch Day: Corn! Bibi! Aledo! Dula! Monsieur Montreal!

Jimmy Dula/Jean Martin vs. Monsieur Montreal/Leon Minisini 11/16/62

MD: Long tag that we miss the start of, and it's good. The last time I saw Dula, I wasn't 100% sure what to make of him. He hit hard but seemed to appeal, ironically, to the crowd after each shot. Here, he held that to between falls and it was pretty funny when he did it and made poor Martin do it with him, plus some fanning antics with the two of them as well, but otherwise, he remained fairly focused and helped to make a 40+ minute tag almost constantly entertaining. He just had this odd way of coming at you, weird angles, a lot of charisma, but hit super hard with his clubbering and headbutts and whatever else, while still being able to work holds. I think he'd improved since last time we saw him. Martin was a persnickety bully, no question, feeling like a guy trapped in a world he didn't make, just being swept along for the ride with Dula and taking it out on his opponents. Big stooging power when he was taking offense too. We won't see more of him, which is a shame. Montreal continues to show me a bit more than I was expecting out of a muscle guy. He works well in this environment, is more than willing to take his opponents' offense, but has some big set pieces to come back with, whether it's a belly to belly toss over the top or big catapults out of the ring. This is it for Minisini too and he was fine and fiery, with big shots when warranted, but a little bit interchangeable with all the others we've seen. Anyway, they kept this moving, kept it entertaining, with Dula almost constantly finding ways to keep himself involved and active. It felt unique in a sea of great, long, hard-hitting tags.

PAS: I thought this was totally excellent. Martin and Dula are cool looking guys, they look like a pair of Sam Cooke bodyguards, and made a really fun team. With Dula as the big bruiser and Martin as more of a frenetic ass kicker. I loved Martin's low angle in ring topes, and he took some fun bumps where he missed them and flew into the crowd. These long tags are very long, but the Martin and Dula team had a bunch of different ways to work exchanges so the time flew by. The finish got super exciting, including an all time great slugfest exchange between Martin and Montreal, it was Lawler vs. Dundee level stuff, with the combos and feints and variety of shots, blew me away. 

Jean Rabut vs. Modesto Aledo 12/14/62

MD: You look back at this footage and it's Modesto Aledo and Tony Charles we really, really wish we had more of. This is it for Aledo though. 3 glorious minutes of he and Rabut really going at it, with clever call back spots (turning the second knee crusher into a shin breaker, turning the second headbutt to the gut off the ropes into a knee lift) and something we've definitely never seen before as he jammed a 'rana, turned it into a power bomb, jammed the press up 'rana attempt, and turned it into a powerbombing backbreaker. This ended with one of the best sunset flips I've ever seen. And that's it for Aledo. Ah well. At least we got a glimpse.

Jacky Corn vs. Cheri Bibi 12/14/62

MD: Totally iconic match that tells you everything you need to know about two of the greatest characters in French Catch. Corn might be the best, most sympathetic seller we've seen, though what holds it all together is how he can turn it on when it's time to fire back. He's excellent technically, though maybe not in the top, top class, but as a total picture wrestler, he's as good as anyone in the footage. He's in those stylist vs stylist matches less because he'd almost be wasted there. You want to see him dominate on the mat early, take a beating in the middle, and them come back with thunderous, battling shots in the stretch. Bibi's come a long way as a tag worker over the years we have footage of and I think that held true in this singles match as well. He's still got that monstrous, almost ever-present look of enjoyment, a bulky way of constantly cheating and leaning on his opponent, but the timing and the purpose of what he does seems tighter and better than what we saw out o f 57 or 58 Bibi. It gave Corn one of the best possible foils to battle against here and they gave us a twenty minute or so match that was focused and pointed, that took the crowd up and brought them down again, and ended clear and clean and definitively in the center of the ring.

SR: 1 Fall match going about 24 minutes. The way I saw this described, I thought this would be like a miracle performance from Bibi in a technical clinic. It wasn‘t that, but it was still pretty great. It was pretty much a mix of tight, simple wrestling and some of the sickest slugging it out in this whole project. Jacky Corn reminds me a bit of a Shinichi Nakano type guy, not the most charismatic and doesn‘t do much fancy, but he will execute his technical moves a little tighter, crank his holds a little harder than everyone else, and engage in some disgustingly violent back and forth strike exchanges. And Cheri Bibi was just a tank here. He didn‘t do anything that made me think he was a genius worker, but he was quite impeccable here as a massive, barrel chested evil dude. The 2nd half of the match is mostly them slugging it out and it was spectacular, with some shots being thrown that would look crazy in a FUTEN match, and both guys lacing each other up with those nasty short kicks. Corn has a lot of things to dish out, at one point he was kicking the shit out of Bibi's shoulder, later he chops him in the throat. And Bibi took and gave as good as he got.

PAS: Pitched fist fight which started at 10 and kept cranking it higher and higher. Bibi looks like Bob Hoskins and has shocking Hoskins in Roger Rabbit level agility when he is taking moves. He is mostly a banger though, hard forearms to the throat, jaw and kidneys, powerful ring shaking slams, he feels like a guy it would absolutely suck to have to wrestle, you are just coming out of it bruised and sore. Corn matches him shot for shot, and even starts exceeding him in violence including some razor chops right to the throat, before finally dumping him with a fast violent tombstone for the duke. This actually felt like a Johnny Valentine match to me, which is about as big a compliment as I can give. This snatches that 1962 slot from Aubriot vs. Bernaert.

ER: You know a match is stiff when the referee works as stiff as the participants. My favorite part of the match - and the most exquisitely filmed shot of the entire match - was the referee throwing some disgusting stomps at Cheri Bibi's wrist and fingers as Bibi's hand gripped the bottom rope. It really made me notice how fearless the ref was the rest of the match, whenever he had to step in between these two to break up a skirmish in the ropes. This guy had uppercuts being thrown inches from his face and he had no problems getting his body in there. Now obviously the referee wasn't the star here, but it certainly added to the presentation for me. Bibi is our favorite Buzz Sawyer/Bob Hoskins hybrid (Buzz Hoskins?) who throws punishing uppercuts, hard combos (love his right punch to the body/left clubbing shot to the back, great rhythm), and full arm shots to the body. His body shots are basically standing clotheslines, a straight arm thrown from different angles about a broad section of Corn's body, and I suspect we'd see some mighty bruising if we had color footage available. 

French Catch tecnicos are always impress me with the amount of punishment they can take, always building to a big comeback, but Corn's selling really put over Bibi's beating. I love how both men sell in the ropes, and how they sell each strike appropriately. The bumping is never over the top, and they don't overuse the bigger bumps to put over bigger strikes. I love the butt drop sell after a particularly nasty uppercut, and each man used it once, really a great way to separate and get across the severity of a particular strike, which wouldn't be as special if they had done it throughout. The tombstone piledriver that Corn finishes Bibi with was on the shortlist of most violent things we've seen in this entire series. The drop happened below the camera line, but you can see where Bibi's head was in relation to Corn's knees, and the way he dropped down fast you can tell Bibi really got crunched. Somebody might have beaten Corn to the drop though, as Bibi's big round head is already square on top of his big round shoulders. This match takes over the crown as our 1962 All Time MOTY, in our list linked below. New champs are always a cause for celebration, and these two earned it. 

ALL TIME MOTY MASTER LIST

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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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