Lipstick & Dynamite
Studio: Koch Lorber Films
Rated: NOT RATED
Website: http://www.lipstickanddynamitethemovie.com/
Release Date: 2005-06-03
Cast: Penny Banner, Lillian Ellison, Gladys Gillem, Judy Grable, Ida May Martinez
Director: Ruth Leitman
WorkNameSort: Lipstick & Dynamite
Our Rating: 3.50
A tough broad is a joy forever, as director Ruth Leitman reveals in Lipstick & Dynamite: The First Ladies of Wrestling, a backward-looking inquiry into the distaff wing of America’s favorite pseudosport. Sought out half a century or more after their hair-pulling heyday, lady wrestlers like The Great Mae Young and Gladys “Killem” Gillem are still a rambunctious bunch: When not talking up the simple delights of home and grandchildren, they’re baiting the camera crew, cussing like longshoremen and bitterly rehashing old grievances (a male acquaintance is recalled as being not “worth the gunpowder to blow him to hell”). These are not women you’d want to cross in the checkout lane at Costco, no matter how much Scotchgard they may have on their living-room furniture.
That octogenarians can be so full of antagonistic joie de vivre is one of the giddiest revelations of Leitman’s film, which otherwise follows an enjoyable but rote path of documentation. In overlapping present-day interviews reinforced by archival photographs and footage, we learn how the typical lady wrestler came from abusive and/or impoverished surroundings, turned to the sport to empower herself and make a few bucks, and then had to contend with jealous rival athletes and the exploitative men who ran the business. “We were the pioneers,” a battered but proud veteran says, echoing a refrain I’m sure I heard in some other filmic group history – oh, I’m sorry, it was every one I’ve ever seen.
Still, anybody who grew up watching wrestling matches on stations like New York’s WOR-TV – back when the pursuit was good and sleazy – will appreciate Leitman’s efforts to put her subjects’ stories into a larger context. Even as we’re learning which specific traumas drove which women into the stables of impresarios like Vince McMahon Sr., we’re getting at least an implied picture of the psychosexual value these stars of the ring had to their audience. From at least as early as the 1940s, it appears, female combatants were as vital to an evening’s entertainment as, well, midgets and Indians. A male fan practically hyperventilates as he lauds his heroines’ “passion,” and one can see the precursor of sadistic spectacles like foxy boxing in the sanctioned brutality that turned the back of one wrestler’s head to cauliflower and may have caused the death of 18-year-old Janet Wolfe – a tragedy that instantly upped the earning power of her opponent and alleged killer, Ella Waldek.
The professional trials revisited here parallel the pitfalls women routinely encounter in similar avenues, like academia and pornography. The Fabulous Moolah (born Lillian Ellison) provides a textbook example of sexist double standard. By exerting a vise-tight control over her career (and, as a manager, over the careers of others), she inspired almost across-the-board resentment – feelings that her naturally abrasive personality did little to quell. Rivals still grumble that the championship belt she professes to have held for 29 years was self-created and thus worthless. That raises a salient question: What do trophies matter when, as most of the ladies admit, the outcomes of their matches were preordained anyway? The simple explanation of why they invested so much import in their “athletic” standing is that they had little else to take pride in. And if that explanation seems facile, how about you tell them?
This article appears in Jun 1-7, 2005.