Tuesday is French Catch Day: Robin! Royal! Hessle! Liehn! Petit Prince! Louis! Noced! Richard!

Vic Hessle/Bert Royal vs. Edmund Liehn/Guy Robin 9/11/58

SR: JIP 2/3 falls match of which we get about 23 minutes. We join about just as the first fall is decided with a spinning toe hold of all things. After that, this is pretty much an all out brawl. Liehn & Robin are all over this, buckling the Brits to the corner and taking them apart like a leaner Anderson brothers. This is the only time we see Liehn, and I really liked him here, a car salesman looking stocky guy who looked like he was trying to pull peoples head off and not holding back with punches and forearms. Robin always looks great in these matches drawing heat and being a pesky shit, and he was great here once again diving off the top rope to knee people in the back. The brief bit where he just decided to slap the shit out of Royal with Royal taking him down and looking like he was gonna kill him had to be one of the best moments in this whole project so far. The job of Hessle & Royal was mostly to just hand out great looking forearms and uppercuts, and that they did. Hessle is the father of Bert & Vic Faulkner, so it‘s cool to have him on tape. He didn‘t do much extraordinary but he looked like a surly barrel chested dude from the local pub. He gave one of the heels a pretty painful looking face massage during a pin attempt and that is what you want from an elderly veteran type face in a tough brawl. Bert Royal is once again dynamite in this. He is so energetic when it‘s time forearm the shit out of someone, and his fast, super-vicious arm assault that left the other guy broken on the mat was awesome.

PAS: I loved every second of this, you had three barrel chested brawlers and Royal who was awesome at using his athleticism to hurt people.  Royal has this cool spot where he climbs up his opponent and knees him right in the face and was willing to throw just as hard as his opponents. Hessle had some of the most violent monkey flips I have seen he uses his stubby legs to just fling his opponent on his head. There is a point at the beginning of the third fall where it seems like everyone stepped out of the script. Robin starts slapping Royal, Royal takes him down (after Robin stonewalls a couple of attempts) and grinds his forearm into his face, which brings in Liehn who starts hammerfisting Royal, which brings in Hessle to throw a slap to the ear. It felt like something you might see in a Japanese interpromotional match. Finish was incredible with Royal just ripping and tearing at Liehn's arm with a spinning arm hold and knees.

MD: Very interesting match. It's our first look at Liehn. Robin is one of my favorites. Royal had the amazing match against Oliver and Vic Hessle is actually his dad. This is 2/3 falls and we come in around 15 mins in at the end of the first fall though we have another 20 plus of action. I liked Liehn right out of the gate. He comes off as big stooging blowhard which works well with Robin's manic alacrity. The difference between this and some of the Delaporte tags is more subtle than striking. The general idea is the same: cheating and swarming with big moments of babyface comeback and dominance. Here though, the comeback setpieces were fewer and shorter and the swarming was both more chaotic and somehow less cooperative. Instead of the elaborate counters and escapes of French Catch, the heels had one goal and only one goal, to get their opponents back to their corner. The ref was all but useless even as there was goozling and choking with the tag rope and Robin coming in again and again with knees off the top. In this regard it almost felt like a lucha trios where the tecnicos were just unable to stop the rudos momentum for almost mystical reasons. The heels were akin to rabid animals just tearing away and doing anything they could to keep the advantage. It made sense, for whenever they lost it, they were punished. There just seemed to be less orchestration behind it without someone like Delaporte directing traffic. Hessle was big and rugged, with meaty, satisfying punches. Royal was spirited, showing a lot of the righteous fire we've seen out of visiting Brits in this footage. Ultimately, this had less big moments (though it had a few like a big battering ram in the corner and the miscommunication between father and son that let the heels take the second fall) but created a very vivid feeling of dirty warfare. That'll stick with you, as will Royal's absolute destruction of Liehn's arm at the end, one of the best maulings to end a match and force a submission you'll ever see.

ER: This was nonstop French action that we've come to expect, a breathless pace a year before Breathless. All of this era Catch that we've seen has been great, but every few weeks we pull something out that is a cut above its peers. This was a perfect use of all four men, with Royal/Robin being the real marquee pairing while Hessle and Liehn brought a ton of personality to go with big clubbing arms. This whole thing was a real fight, the kind of match I can watch a few times and notice new things each time. Royal is such a scrapper, undersized compared with the other men but he sure doesn't act like he's undersized. He hits as hard as anyone here and had inventive ways of overcoming any size differences. I loved how he climbed up Liehn, almost like he was going to do a monkey flip and then thought "why stop there?" He climbs up bit by bit, clenching his neck with both hands, one leg at a time, before boosting off a thigh with a great knee. It was nice payback for Liehn practically cranking Royal's head off with a cravat earlier. Hessle brings a cool dad charisma to this, like a Catch Pat Patterson, and his scraps with Robin may have been my favorite parts of the match. Robin took out his hairline on the immaculately coiffed Hessle, locking in one of the sickest chokes I've seen. He hooked his arm around Hessle's neck like he was going for a judo throw but just leaned into the choke, throwing a punch to the kidneys when Hessle almost broke it. I loved Hessle coming in throughout the match to break up the heels, and how Liehn would subtly stooge for him, the best being one punch that knocked him back on his heels and onto his butt, holding his face and head like he wasn't expecting it. The finish was joy filled savagery, Royal twisting and kneeing and leaping on Liehn's arm with glee and a glazed over rage. It almost looked like Robin didn't want to step in and stop it because he didn't want any part of that Andy Capp dust cloud.


Le Petit Prince/Francis Louis vs. Daniel Noced/Jacky Richard 2/22/71

SR:2/3 Falls match going about 30 minutes. The evolution of the lightweight style in France is interesting to watch. Basically, they still did the same moves as 15 years earlier, but everything smoother, and with a formula in place, making these matches approach the same rhythm, similiar to a Lucha trios. You had the Prince and his partner Louis looking fantastic as you‘d expect, with lots of stupidly fast armdrags and everything being executed with a sense of struggle, and also a real standout performance from Daniel Noced. Not only was Noced a great base and dance partner for all the flashy shit in the match, when the time was right he just kicked the shit out of the Prince and even chucked Francis Louis over the top rope. The heel beatdown on the Prince was pretty intense with him eating a ton of kicks to the ribs and body shots as well as getting hammered into the mat over and over. It‘s also the kind of things that people who aren‘t used to European wrestling can watch and easily get into, as there were multiple cut offs building to the Prince finally getting the hot tag and Louis rolling in to give the heels what they had coming to them. The ring being pelted with garbage is an iconic sight too. The Prince remains the focus of the match though, as he soon eats a nasty posting. Noced takes a spill to the outside and a near riot breaks out, with folks surrounding him and the police having to break the scenery up. The ending with the Prince covered in blood looking to get a piece of Noced and towel being thrown in was something else too.

MD: What made this work as well as almost anything we've seen in the collection so far was the marrying of the slickness of Petit Prince matches with the patience and discipline of a narrative-heavy Southern Tag. It's equal parts spectacular and accessible; plenty of style, plenty of substance. We're talking shine-heat-comeback (and a breathtaking shine at that), with the added story element of Prince demanding to get back in, again and again, when he wasn't ready to fight in order to get revenge. When I say discipline, I mean that while there were a lot of illegal double-teams behind the ref's back to build up heat, the ref missing the hot tag didn't happen until right before the end of the first fall. They held it off until it'd mean the most and then almost immediately went to the finish of the fall afterwards. When you have a two-out-of-three-falls structure, you can do that. That's what built the fans up to a fever pitch and that allowed things to boil over as they went into the second fall. By that point the crowd was already throwing things into the ring. Obviously, we've seen that sort of thing before elsewhere. What really made this stand out here, though, was that this was awash in the 70s French juniors style. The hope spots here were Prince utilizing more and more elaborate escape attempts only for his opponent to either hang on to the hold or immediately thereafter cut him off and put him right back in. Basically, it leveraged what we've been seeing all throughout 57 and 58, the way they strung together matches with long, dogged holds and frequent escape attempts, and overlaid that onto the southern tag format. When your face in peril is one of the most athletic and agile wrestlers ever, a smaller underdog, someone who can portray a singular fire and passion, and your heels are a bunch of real goons: Noced who was an uppity bully and Richard who just had this meanstreak intensity to him, well, you're going to get results. Add in some color and that's a riot. The finish was equal parts triumphant and satisfying and heartbreaking and leaving you wanting so much more. Exceptional stuff.

PAS: This was awesome stuff, a true discovery. Much of the Prince we have seen before was like an early Rey Jr. exhibition match, like Rey vs. Psicosis in WAR. This was more like Rey vs. Eddie on Smackdown, a complete violent match with a dramatic arc and huge payoff. We still get some of the crazy takedowns and evasions from the Prince and he also gets the shit kicked out him, including Noced grabbing him by the side of the head and driving him into the mat temple first. We get a real hyped up hot tag with Louis throwing big uppercuts. Prince gets lawn darted head first into the ringpost and comes up bloody, and we get an awesome fired up bloody babyface standing tall moment, with the crowd trying to murder Noced. This is in the highest level of matches we have seen in this project, really an all timer.

ER: This was spectacular, like seeing a Michinoku Pro trios for the first time, except I'm not sure any of them were as good as Le Petit Prince (and those guys were GOOD). His sequences are so tight, so believable in their physics, this small man knowing exactly which way to swing the pendulum to make the most of his momentum. There are plenty of small wrestlers now who just expect larger wrestlers to bump for everything they do, and that's what happens. Most of the time, it looks absurd. Prince connects all those dots and makes it look crazy if one of his big armdrags didn't take someone down. He moves so fast that he makes typical time stand still moments look incredible, like when he crawls through his opponents legs to get the drop on them. He actually scrambles through opponents' legs fast enough that he is back on the attack before they turn around in real time! Noced and Richard are great heels for him to work his magic against, as Noced especially is a great base for his flying, and then cruel as can be when the tables turn. Louis is a wonderful babyface partner, taking a couple big bumps to the floor, always ready to fight for Prince. This whole thing really jumps up another level once the heel team starts cutting Prince off, with Noced and Richard putting the boots to them, like two Sonnys giving Carlo twice the beating he deserved. Noced had this running kick that was greater than any punt I've seen in wrestling the past several years. These two were just burying kicks in Prince's ribs and off the side of his head, to the point where a riot felt like a reasonable reaction. Fans immediately swarm Noced the second he hits the floor, with one tall Daniel Stern motherfucker leaping hard into the fray with a cigarette hanging out the corner of his mouth. That was an organic reaction inspired by tremendous ring work, the kind of match where you know you're watching something special the whole way through.


PAS: Hell of a week, which places two matches on our All Time MOTY list, with Le Petit Prince tag beating out  Tony & Roy St. Clair v. Vic Faulkner & Bert Royal for 1971. Bert Royal got bumped out of the 70s, but he stays on our All Time MOTY list with 1958.


ALL TIME MOTY LIST