Wrestlers' opinions of each other

[Dylan Waco]

Race and Matysik are St. Louis guys in my mind and there is a huge conflict with Memphis wrestling.

[shoe]

Which Funk. Terry loved working with him.

[JerryvonKramer]

Race and Matysik are St. Louis guys in my mind and there is a huge conflict with Memphis wrestling.

Yeah, I think that nails it Dylan.

[DR Ackermann]

From Terry Funks' book

 

Lawler, right now, could step into a WWE ring, get on the microphone and cut as good a promo as the top 10 percent. Lawler could get into the ring and work as well as the top 10 percent, if he wanted to, and he can also throw a better punch than 99.9 percent of anyone working today.

[Loss]

As much as I love Lawler, I also understand why he isn't everyone's cup of tea, and I don't think some of the criticisms levied against him are without merit.

[JerryvonKramer]

Thanks for that Funk stuff.

[DR Ackermann]

I wonder if a more interesting example of what you're talking about is comedians like Jerry Lewis or Harold Lloyd who were ignored by critics for a long time. Or directors who did women's pictures like Douglas Sirk.

Maybe John Huston, but the other way around? Critics like him enough, although there's also a backlash towards him because of the auteur theory, but you don't hear director's praising him.

 

I think the problem with the point I've been trying to get across is that I've been focusing on specific schools of thought and ways of thinking that certain critics and directors have or had at one time and applying them like they're universal, when they only represent certain portions.

 

I think you could make a separate analogy for Alfred Hitchcock before the 60s or so and Jerry Lawler. Hitchcock was liked enough by some critics, but he was also largely dismissed as "populist" and wasn't appreciated the way he is now before the new wave critics-turned-directors put him on a pedestal and then all the critics who derided him changed their minds or died out.

[El-P]

I've only seen the films he did with Bourvil and Gerald Oury, Le Corniaud and La Grande Vadrouille, but he seemed like an amusing little fellow.

Yep. Those two are these best. Just über classic popular movies in France for the last 50 years. i've watche dit countless times since I'm like 6 or 7 years old. A few other of his classics are La Folies des Grandeurs with Yves Montand this time (Bourvil was supposed to get the role but he died just before) and Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob, both from Oury. The adaptation from the play Oscar is fun just to watch De Funes go batshit insane. He made a lot of mediocre/shitty movies though, so it hurts the perception of his talent. But recently guys like Denis Podalydes, who's a critic darling and who does a lot of auteur's movies, saying De Funes was great and an influence on him shed a new light on his work (from the critics I mean, he's an immensely popular actor including decades after his death).

 

Comedy often gets shafted by critics.

Yes. Which is very unfair, as comedy is the most difficult stuff to do. Real good comedy I mean. And comedian are more respected when they do "serious", dramatic stuff. We call it the "Tchao Pantin" effect in France. Coluche was a superstar comedian in the 80's but was only doing not so good funny movies. And then he does a super dramatic role in the very dark "Tchao Pantin", gets a Cesar (our Academy Award) and all of a sudden he's finally viewed as a great actor. To this day a comedian doing a dramatic role is called "making a Tchao Pantin" here, to the point of being a cliché for comedians trying to get respectability.

[jdw]

My feeling is that Ford remains highly regarded but that critics gravitate towards one film.

Taking that list a step further and knocking out the votes for the High movie for each director, you get this:

 

176 Godard (24.5%)

127 Hitchcock (60.1%)

106 Tarkovsky (30.7%)

100 Bresson (32.9%)

97 Bunuel (14.9%)

95 Bergman (33.6%)

93 Dreyer (41.1%)

92 Coppola (36.6%)

82 Ozu (56.6%)

80 Ford (49.4%)

79 Renoir (55.9%)

79 Kurosawa (37.8%)

74 Welles (68.0%)

69 Chaplin (29.6%)

67 Kubrick (57.3%)

67 Antonioni (39.1%)

66 Powell, Pressburger (21.4%)

65 Fellini (49.6%)

64 Hawks (27.3%)

59 Scorsese (39.2%)

57 Lang (37.4%)

56 Mizoguchi (34.1%)

52 Lynch (43.5%)

51 Rossellini (38.6%)

41 Murnau (69.4%)

25 Eisenstein (71.6%)

 

Ford is now #10 for rather than #6. Though the gap from 6-10 was 9 points before, and 15 points now... it's a marginal drop.

 

More interesting is the % numbers that I listed. Those are the % of points that each of those director's #1 movie got. Let's sort that:

 

71.6% Eisenstein

69.4% Murnau

68.0% Welles

60.1% Hitchcock

57.3% Kubrick

56.6% Ozu

55.9% Renoir

49.6% Fellini

49.4% Ford

43.5% Lynch

41.1% Dreyer

39.2% Scorsese

39.1% Antonioni

38.6% Rossellini

37.8% Kurosawa

37.4% Lang

36.6% Coppola

34.1% Mizoguchi

33.6% Bergman

32.9% Bresson

30.7% Tarkovsky

29.6% Chaplin

27.3% Hawks

24.5% Godard

21.4% Powell, Pressburger

14.9% Bunuel

 

Ford is 9th. The average for each is 42.3%, and he's a bit above that. But...

 

Ford's #1 accounts for a lower % of his overall total than Ozu's #1, despite Ozu having the #3 and #15 films.

 

Ford's #1 accounts for a lower % of his overall total than Hitchcock's #1, despite Hitchcockhaving the #1, #34, and two tied at #53 films.

 

Okay... wait... there's an easier way to make this more obvious:

 

 

71.6% Eisenstein (#11 ranked Battleship Potemkin)

69.4% Murnau (#5 ranked Sunrise)

68.0% Welles (#2 ranked Citizen Kane)

60.1% Hitchcock (#1 ranked Vertigo)

57.3% Kubrick (#6 ranked 2001)

56.6% Ozu (#3 ranked Tokyo Story)

55.9% Renoir (#4 ranked La Règle du jeu)

49.6% Fellini (#10 ranked 8½)

49.4% Ford (#7 ranked Searchers)

 

So what happened?

 

For 9 of the directors of the Top 11 movies, there was a massive "consensus" on what their best movie was. Roughly half the votes they got were from that one movie, and for some a good deal more than half.

 

The difference between Ford and those other 8 directors isn't that his #1 was the massive consensus best movie of his career. It's that there wasn't a consensus of what his #2 and/or #3 and/or #4 movies were to get him even a second one into the Top 100.

 

You only needed 17 votes to get into the Top 100. Ford had 80 votes other than The Searchers. That's more than Welles, Kubrick, Renoir, Fellini, Kurosawa, etc... just 2 less than Ozu.

 

Ozu's second ranked movie got 50 of his remaining 82 (61%) votes.

 

Ford's second ranked movie got 14 (8.9%) of his remaining votes. That's extremely low for directors who turned up on a lot of ballots.

 

So... The Searches vote isn't the odd thing. It's that the rest of Ford's body of work is appreciated, but with too many movies breaking up the votes without creating a strong #2 and/or strong #3 like the other top directors did. That actually reflects well on Ford to a degree.

[jdw]

Larry Matysik is down on Lawler too, it's not an uncommon view from guys of that era.

Conversely Jim Cornette thinks Lawler is the best of all time

 

Larry was a St Louis guy. Corny grew up watching and then working in the Memphis territory. You'll get stuff like that.

[DR Ackermann]

That's pretty impressive, jdw. I think what also needs to be taken into account when considering where these movies are ranked, is that each vote for a movie means that the voter considered it one of the 10 best or one of their 10 favorite movies. So not only did they like the movie, they really liked it, so my original argument gets weaker and weaker.

[Cox]

Race and Matysik are St. Louis guys in my mind and there is a huge conflict with Memphis wrestling.

What I've always found fascinating is, Memphis and St Louis, geographically, are extremely close, only a five hour drive. Yet wrestling wise, they are worlds apart.

[Loss]

The film director analogies have taken this thread too far off course. Can we go back to wrestlers and their opinions of each other?

[DR Ackermann]

Nick Bockwinkel said that Lawler was good and Jack Briscoe said he was really underrated.

[Phil Schneider]

I think Race's best career match is with Lawler. Lawler was the way better guy in it too

[goodhelmet]

Larry Matysik is down on Lawler too, it's not an uncommon view from guys of that era.

Conversely Jim Cornette thinks Lawler is the best of all time

 

Yeah, Cornette is a smart man... at least in this instance he nailed it correctly.

[flyonthewall2983]

In Race's book, he says Vader had more natural ability than anyone he managed and was the most agile big guy he'd ever seen. He says: "In fact, he might be the best big man to ever enter the ring. Just don't tell him I said it." His problem with Vader was getting him to hold back.

I remember he criticized him for going to stiff on Flair for their Starrcade match in Ric's book. It seems to me that he was good for Vader as a manager, both on screen and behind the scenes as well. I suspect too that Harley not being around after his wreck made things much more difficult for Leon in WCW, leading up to Paul Orndorff's heroic moment.

[King Solomon]

David Shultz in his shoot thought that Buddy Rose was a joke as a headliner in Portland, compared him to Lawler who he also didn't look favorably upon.

[pantherwagner]

A lot of wrestlers in Mexico say that El Santo was a really shitty worker. The only evidence we have got to analyse is whatever clips we have of his movies, and every time I have seen him he looks pretty good on them. Of course they are also not full matches but it is enough to see he is far from being a bad worker. Blue Demon, who was supposed to be ten times the worker, seems to be his worse critic and who knows how much of that is due to jealousy.

 

Same think about Mil Mascaras. A lot of undercard and mid card wrestlers that he probably snubbed with his prima donna attitude used to talk about him like he couldn't mat wrestle and he was only a high spot monkey (which is funny as other than his few flying spots he wrestled a super safe Dory Funk Jr. type mat style not really taking hard bumps on his back). I remember Dick Steinborn being especially angry at him whenever his name was brought up on Wrestling Classics. He also often got the Thesz/Gotch criticism as being unprofessional because he wouldn't give you holds, you had to take them. However, I have read Thesz, Brisco, Destroyer, Funk Jr., Tim Woods, Wahoo and Manny Fernandez among others praise him as being a tremendous mat wrestler.

 

Recently I read an interview where Dr. Lucha (Shimizu, not Sims) separately asked El Solar and Negro Navarro who the best five Mexican workers ever are. They, without talking to each other, gave the same list of five: El Solitario, Ray Mendoza, Rene Guajardo, Angel Blanco and Anibal.

 

Tiger Mask is another guy who super hardcore fans don't praise as a worker anymore, but those who worked with him still talk about him with reverence. Both Solar and Navarro have said he's the best foreign wrestler they have ever worked with.

[ohtani's jacket]

Recently I read an interview where Dr. Lucha (Shimizu, not Sims) separately asked El Solar and Negro Navarro who the best five Mexican workers ever are. They, without talking to each other, gave the same list of five: El Solitario, Ray Mendoza, Rene Guajardo, Angel Blanco and Anibal.

These are all guys I've watched clips of in the past few days. How much of Solar and Navarro's opinions are because these were the guys on top when they were coming up. That's a really distinct group of workers who wrestled each other around the same time.

[pantherwagner]

I thought it was something similar (with the added note that Anibal was a contemporary rather than a guy on top when they were up and comers). The truth is also that we don't have a lot of them on tape. When they talk about best foreign wrestlers (5 Japanese and 5 non Japanese) they mention some "modern guys" if you want to call that to guys from the 90s: Pegasus Kid and Eddie Guerrero. Everybody else are old timers.

 

This also reminds me of a time when I went with Dory Dixon to this tiny lucha gym in Puebla. Can't remember the name of the guy running it but he is one of the guys that trained Skayde so I recognised his name. I mentioned to him how popular Skayde was in the US indies and how he was considered a great lucha maestro and he was truly puzzled. He told me that he could probably name 50 guys he trained who are better than Skayde on the mat (he didn't say this with a dismissive or condescending tone, more a surprised tone). I guess it shows how different the opinions are from those inside to those outside the business.

[DR Ackermann]

Who were the rest of the foreigners they listed?

[ohtani's jacket]

I thought the toughest one to get a handle on was Anibal was in some of the footage he works like a middleweight and in some of the footage he's a bulked up light heavyweight.

 

Is it just me or was Fishman always a pretty good brawler?

[pantherwagner]

Who were the rest of the foreigners they listed?

Solar: Buffalo Allen (Bad News Brown), Andre the Giant, Eddie Guerrero, Dory Dixon, Coloso Colosetti

Navarro: Pegasus Kid, Eddie Guerrero, Dory Dixon, Kato Kung Lee, Angelico (old Spanish wrestler)

 

And the Japanese

Solar: Tiger Mask, Gran Hamada, Tatsumi Fujinami, Hatsu Masataka (Kosuke Hashimoto), Masanobu Kurisu

Navarro: Tiger Mask, Gran Hamada, Ultimo Dragon, Kuniaki Kobayashi, Katsuhisa Shibata

[pantherwagner]

I thought the toughest one to get a handle on was Anibal was in some of the footage he works like a middleweight and in some of the footage he's a bulked up light heavyweight.

 

Is it just me or was Fishman always a pretty good brawler?

I'm not overly impressed with the 80s Anibal I have seen, either. But it's not a lot of footage.

 

On Fishman, yeah, I think he always had an undeserved bad rep because most people have only seen the alcoholic broken down version in AAA. But he was pretty decent back in the day. Wish we had footage of his tag team run with Solitario where they were the punk masked rudos who would face anyone: rudos, tecnicos, foreigners, whomever, which was the blueprint for the latter Aguayo and Fishman tag team that tore the house down for years at El Toreo in main events.