Review: …All the Marbles

Vicki Frederick and Laurene Landon play the California Dolls, a female wrestling tag team who travel the USA with their manager Peter Falk (who used to have a thing with one of the Dolls). The film charts their attempts at rising in the ranks, whilst also fighting to just get paid enough by shitty promoters. Tracy Reed and Ursaline Bryant-King play a rival tag team, John Hancock is their manager. Burt Young plays a shonky promoter, whilst Richard Jaeckel turns up briefly as Earl Hebner…er…sorry, as a crooked referee.

 

I chastised the otherwise excellent “Requiem for a Heavyweight” for portraying wrestling extremely negatively, which I felt was a little over-the-top for a film made in 1962, not today’s climate of ‘sports entertainment’. Well here’s a Robert Aldrich (“The Dirty Dozen”, “Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte”, “Emperor of the North Pole”) film from 1981 about women’s tag team wrestling, and it tries to sell it as almost 100% legit! The only hint of ‘kayfabe’ (wrestling parlance for…well, not a legit or ‘shoot’ fight) we get here is the suggestion that the home tag team is expected to win, and our heroines suggest that if the home team wanted to win, they should’ve tried harder. As someone who has been watching wrestling on and off since 1986, I know that the truth about wrestling is that it’s considerably less ‘fake’ than ignoramuses think. It’s got fake punches and fake storylines, but in other ways, there’s still some genuine impact to the body (just that they usually try not to hurt each other as much as they would in a legit fight), and potential for injury, especially if something goes wrong. Some wrestlers like to work ‘stiff’ (which is another term for, well, a lot less ‘fake’), and there are some moves that are very hard to perform without at least a little bit of pain involved. I mean, do YOU want to take an open hand slap to the chest from a 7ft giant? I certainly don’t. The final match here as presented, is amusing but even more ‘fake’ (which, by the way, is a word I hate. I prefer ‘choreographed and pre-determined’ and even that isn’t entirely accurate) than modern day wrestling, despite being played as ‘legit’. Bizarre. We even get a crooked referee angle portrayed as real (for the benefit of the film audience, not just the audience in the film itself if you get my meaning), for fuck’s sake, decades before the infamous ‘Montreal Screwjob’. I’m also not convinced that a sunset flip, even in pre-WWF/E era women’s wrestling would be an acceptable finishing move. Today, wrestlers don’t even use a sunset flip bomb as a finisher, let alone a simple sunset flip itself, both are seen as ‘transitional’ moves at best. So that was a little hard to swallow for me.

 

Scripted by Mel Frohman, the film gets the a-hole promoters down pat (Hello, Burt Young), but it feels like they’re touring the entire country all in one go, rather than working a particular territory/promotion, finishing up after a while and moving on. If I’m wrong about that, then the film doesn’t show it coherently enough. This feels more like boxing than wrestling, to me (while the mud wrestling scene seems more like barnyard wrestling). And we’re talking about a film about not only women’s wrestling, but women’s tag team wrestling, which is like a niche within a niche inside a niche form of entertainment (Women’s tag team wrestling barely even exists at all in 2014. Sure, there used to be teams like the Jumping Bomb Angels, but…who else? Not nearly as many teams as this film seems to suggest, I’d wager).

 

Obviously the film’s POV is a little bit silly and tough to swallow for anyone who really knows their stuff (Though my knowledge is more 1986-1994, and 2007-present, not so much the territory days). Thankfully, the film does have other merits, in fact as inaccurate as it may be, it’s still a pretty well-made film in many respects, sadly Aldrich’s last. The working class town scenery captured by Joseph Biroc (“Forty Guns”, “Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte”, “Emperor of the North Pole”) is a definite standout, as is Peter Falk’s performance as the soft-hearted manager. The sorely underrated Burt Young is spot-on as a bastard promoter, and although not great actresses, both Vicki Frederick and Laurene Landon are convincing enough in and out of the ring. The fact that they are pretty but not knockouts is fairly accurate for the era, I believe too (The Fabulous Moolah, anyone?). And the film does get the occasional thing right, like Landon taking pills for pain, which is certainly accurate, and although I might quibble about the layout of the matches, it’s obvious the two actresses are doing all their own stuff, and most of their opponents look to be pro-wrestlers too, which helps things look a little more authentic. There’s also a reasonable amount of nudity in the film too, which is nice (i.e. the mud wrestling scene).

 

While this film is amiable, and Peter Falk is terrific, it loses steam in the second half, it’s inaccurate and not really for wrestling fans. I’m not sure it’ll really interest non-fans, either, though. As for me, I probably shouldn’t have liked it at all, but I found it sorta watchable, all things considered.

 

Rating: C+