The slobbiness inherent in the subject -- women's professional wrestling -- is not as overwhelming as might be feared. For all the undoubted appeals to T-&-A fanciers, and for all the distant Rocky parallels played up in the ads, this turns out to be a surprisingly downbeat comedy, with a perhaps not so surprising emphasis on seedy sports arenas, Spartan locker rooms, cheap motels, and fast-food restaurants, but with also a really fresh and accurate and unromanticizing eye for late-autumn Midwest landscape. Director Robert Aldrich throws away a great chance at further downbeatness, in the misanthropic Lardner vein, by maintaining the illusion that these stomp-and-gouge sporting events are strictly on the up and up, apparently believing that much of their melodramatic punch would be lost if it were admitted that their outcome is predetermined. But the lack of correspondence of these matches to "real" professional wrestling is really only a problem to the extent that their melodramatic manipulations are so much cruder and clumsier. The one thing that can be pointed to as putting these matches above the "real" ones seen on TV is that they are better shot and edited. And the movie as a whole is most defensible on the purely visual level, on which it can be safe from all scowls directed at its subject matter. Peter Falk, Vicki Frederick, Laurene Landon. (1981) — Duncan Shepherd