Four decades ago, the American director Robert Aldrich made the most cheerful, companionable, and charitable movie ever produced about professional wrestling. Against all expectations, Aldrich—the grand master of the grotesque on the basis of such cartoonishly misanthropic masterpieces as Kiss Me Deadly, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Legend of Lylah Clare—found the kinder side of his personality in …All the Marbles, centered on a fictitious female wrestling duo, the California Dolls, played winsomely by Vicki Frederick and Laurene Landon. Sure there’s plenty of thrashing in the ring, but in Aldrich’s conception, the Dolls are admirable, even virtuous, for their spirit and pluck: the pride they take in performing and the strength they show in talking back to their parsimonious promoter (Peter Falk). For Aldrich, professional wrestlers are contemporary descendants of troubadours, circus performers, and clowns—not unlike the woebegone clown Calvero in Chaplin’s classic Limelight (a film on which Aldrich served as assistant director). In its insistence on the humanity of characters among such tawdry environs, …All the Marbles is more deserving of praise than many films on more obviously respectable subjects.
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