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.