Kino Lorber
Queen of the Ring tells the story of Mildred Burke’s rise through the male-controlled world of midwestern carnival and pro wrestling in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s.
It’s the story of an industry in which reality doesn’t exist and a brash athletic woman who got to the top of a world of wealthy con artists before ultimately being undone by her own husband.
Writer-director Ash Avildsen’s film understands half of that story, and frames it as an earnest crowd-pleaser with traditional set ups and pay offs of the trailblazing autobiography film. It’s a well-made film that uses its small budget effectively and has great reverence for the source material, but strangely that very aspect may be the project’s greatest weakness.
The world of wrestling in the 1940’s was a group of reprobates, con artists, criminals, and crazy people who literally couldn’t function in everyday society– this shouldn’t feel like A League of Their Own.
Beginning as a struggling single mother, Mildred Burke (Emily Bett Rickards) becomes determined to wrestle professionally despite NWA promoters barring women from entering the ring. She persuades trainer and promoter Billy Wolfe (Josh Lucas) to give her a shot, then develops into both a champion and a major regional attraction under his management.
As her fame grows, their professional relationship becomes a troubled marriage with constant infidelity and increasingly bitter disputes over money. Burke encounters a Rogue’s Gallery of the Golden Age of American Pro Wrestling: eccentric promoter Jack Pfefer (Walton Goggins), celebrated wrestler and future 1990’s WWF star Mae Young (Francesca Eastwood), rival grappler June Byers (Kailey Farmer), loyal wrestler Gladys Gillem (Deborah Ann Woll) and the undisputed legend of 1950’s wrestling, Gorgeous George (Adam Demos). I have to admit I truly got a kick out of seeing modern actors take on these legendary, oversized performers that were way before my time as a wrestling fan.
First of all: Rickards is very good in the role as written. Her performance avoids turning Burke into a secular feminist saint, emphasizing instead her stubbornness, appetite for competition and blind, self-destructive, faith in Wolfe. She is tremendous in the quieter moments when Mildred realizes that becoming a top draw hasn’t freed her from the network of carny nonsense that promoters used to entrap and take advantage of their performers. She communicates the character’s exhaustion without diminishing her toughness.
Josh Lucas is totally in his wheelhouse as a sleazeball promoter and unfaithful husband. Lucas does not play him as a straightforward monster. He presents Wolfe as a man who genuinely recognizes Burke’s greatness while also believing that discovering it entitles him to every reward from it. He believes he owns her magnificent body and all the money that comes from it.
The supporting cast provides flashes of the wilder film Queen of the Ring might have been. Goggins makes Jack Pfefer a wonderfully slippery creature, seemingly assembled from cigar smoke, salesmanship and malicious inspiration. Eastwood brings an intimidating directness to Mae Young, while Woll gives Gladys warmth without making her merely saintly. Demos enjoys the theatrical vanity of Gorgeous George, and the professional wrestlers appearing throughout lend the ring scenes weight and credibility. Even characters given limited screen time arrive with strong silhouettes and memorable attitudes.
Unfortunately, the screenplay keeps sanding down the peculiarities these performers introduce. The script is arranged into the familiar grammar of the biopic: humble beginnings, resistance from gatekeepers, training, triumph, betrayal and hard-won independence. Those beats are well-made, but this is a pretty sanitized, compromised version of the life story of a woman who was playing so freely with fetish, sex, and gender the way Burke was in the 1940’s Midwest. The narrative moves dutifully from one milestone to another when it should be a different, much wilder film.
That conventionality is particularly frustrating not only because professional wrestling in the 1940s was such an unstable mixture of sport, theatre, hustling and regional mythology, but because the film never really mentions why Burke became the biggest wrestler in America in her hey-day and why that hey-day was ultimately so short: she was beating up men who liked to be beat up by a pretty muscular girl. She was a version of the old carnival strongman gimmick where she would take on open challenges and while some of the bouts were undoubtedly more or less on the level, she was playing with what we now recognize as kink.
In this world of wrestling promoters protected secrets while publicly manufacturing feuds. Performers lived inside characters that could become more famous than their private selves. Athletic contests coexisted with schemes, grudges and brazen publicity stunts. Women’s wrestling added a new dynamic: its performers could be condemned as indecent and simultaneously marketed as sensational attractions. The film sort of acknowledges this but it feels cleaner and more emotionally legible than it should because it doesn’t want to tarnish its subject.
A bolder screenplay might have played more aggressively with performance and reality, forcing viewers to question when Mildred was working an audience, when Wolfe was working Mildred and when everyone involved had begun believing the mythology they sold. Instead, everything is clearly communicated…in a world of carnival con artists.
Avildsen also treats Burke’s achievements with such reverence that her contradictions never become fully dangerous. The movie tells us she revolutionized wrestling, but it does not quite convey how truly weird that revolution must have appeared.This is a good, sincere sports drama about an extraordinary woman. With more honesty, it might have been an extraordinary one.
Extras include deleted scenes and trailer.
