Proto-feminists who took off their gloves

Now that what was once transgressive is ho-hum and hard-core escapades only enhance a career, it’s no wonder that the former bad boys of the fringe sports world -- outlaw surfers, skateboarders, dirt bikers -- have been the subject of laudatory documentaries that present them through the warm and cozy gaze of worshipful nostalgia.

“Lipstick & Dynamite,” subtitled “The First Ladies of Wrestling,” is different, and not just because its subjects, determined professionals who flourished largely from the 1940s into the 1970s, are women and not men.

And it’s not different because its director, Ruth Leitman, doesn’t admire these women extravagantly: Indeed she does, going so far as to call the half-dozen she profiles -- including such legendary grapplers as Gladys “Kill ‘em” Gillem, the Great Mae Young and the “Fabulous Moolah” Lillian Ellison -- “the most stunning, un-self-proclaimed feminists in sports entertainment history.”

There certainly is a lot to be impressed with about these remarkable women. Brash and brassy, very much their own people, they developed big, wonderfully fearless personalities in the course of making an impact on a hostile world. When one of them says “I’ve bluffed my way through half of my life,” she could be speaking for the group.

What makes “Lipstick & Dynamite” its own animal is that, intentionally or not, the director has allowed something else into the mix, a glimpse of the unvarnished and the unsanitized. The uneasy, unnerving air of the carny hangs over this film, and it gives off a pungent whiff of how rough, rowdy and raucous, how inescapably down and dirty, these women’s world could be.

The competitors we meet still hold bitter grudges and tell unpleasant tales about romantic and personal rivalries. We hear about unscrupulous promoters and cutthroat tactics, about crippling injuries and a death in the ring that happened because one of the girls, as they call themselves, was unwilling to tell the promoter that she felt something was wrong. Though these women are capable survivors who would die rather than ask for sympathy, that doesn’t prevent “Lipstick & Dynamite” from being more unsettling, having more of an air of poignancy than might be expected.

The only thing “Lipstick” doesn’t confront head-on is the question of how legitimate these women’s bouts were. Clearly, the wrestlers experienced frequent injury and real pain, but that is not the same as saying the results of their battles were not to a certain extent preordained. The women talk darkly of how “the titles belong to the promoters,” but except for a comment from “Kill ‘em” Gillem about how, in contrast to her wrestling experience, the action in her subsequent careers of lion tamer and alligator wrestler was “on the up and up,” no one, including the filmmaker, wants to get too close to this taboo subject.

It was in carnivals and on fairgrounds that female wrestling started as a novelty act. During World War II, the same absence of men that put women in factories put them into metropolitan arenas as featured attractions.

The stories these women tell almost all begin the same way: impoverished, nightmarish tomboy childhoods in which they were “beaten hell out of for no reason”; the early deaths of mothers; a determination to get the heck out of Dodge and see the world at a time when opportunities for women to do that were much more limited. And, finally, the inevitable name change for simplicity and psychological protection: Ida Selenkow became Ida Mae Martinez, Elsie Schevchenko became Ella Waldek, Mary Ann Kostecki became Peggy Banner.

All these women eventually came under the control of the late Billy Wolfe, the promoter who took 50% of their earnings and controlled their bookings. “I hope when you die they bury you in the gutter,” one of the wrestlers told him when she left his management, and she was not alone in that thought.

Leitman, who’s made several documentaries, has done a fine job of scouring archives to get footage of the girls in action and on their best behavior on TV shows like “I’ve Got a Secret” and “To Tell the Truth.” She also recruited alternative musicians such as Neko Case, the Moonlighters and Los Straitjackets to do a noticeably eclectic score.

Leitman lets the women present themselves just the way they are, which is not always decorous. Eighty-something Gillem, for instance, the oldest surviving wrestler of her generation, has a vocabulary that would intimidate a gangsta rapper.

Gleeful bad girls the Fabulous Moolah (“Just write my checks and don’t let them bounce”) and the Great Mae Young, both still active in the ring despite advanced age, now live together and share their house with a former midget wrestler named Diamond Lil.

When the surprised director discusses this with Waldek, she cracks back, “Did that blow your little mind?” The answer is yes, and it’s to “Lipstick & Dynamite’s” credit that a whole lot more does as well.

*

‘Lipstick & Dynamite’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Considerable rough language

A Ruthless Films production in association with 100-to-One Films, released by Koch Lorber Films. Director Ruth Leitman. Producers Ruth Leitman, Debbie Nightingale. Executive producers Lydia Dean Pilcher, James Jernigan. Cinematographers Ruth Leitman, Nancy Segler. Editors Ruth Leitman, M. Connie Diletti. Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes.

In limited release.