3. Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows
With Wrestling with Shadows, director Paul Jay was hoping to get up close and personal with one of the biggest professional wrestling stars of all time; multi-time WWF Champion Bret The Hitman Hart. Hart was being courted at the time by rival company WCW and was in the midst of contract re-negotiations. As a term of his contract, Hart requested that Jay and his team be allowed a great deal of access to the WWF, its archives and, crucially, its wrestlers. It is fortunate for Hart that he did so. The first hour of the film chronicles, cleanly and respectfully, the backstage process that goes into putting on a major wrestling show. Hart is seen working out his matches with Pat Pattersen, whilst Big Van Vader (at the time the biggest monster in the wrestling business) is shown nonchalantly discussing his real estate ventures as he laces up his boots. Life on the road is juxtaposed against footage of Hart at home with his family (in particular his youngest son, Blade). Elsewhere, Jay gets up close and personal with wrestlers like Mick Foley, Goldust, Jim The Anvil Neidhart, British Bulldog Davey Boy Smith and several others. Without the (now famous) ending, Jay would already have delivered an intimate portrait of the WWF Champion's life and career, as well as a (then rare) look inside the wrestling business. Once again, this was no tacky expose, as so many subsequent wrestling "documentaries" have been, this was an intrepid and utterly journalistic voyage into a fascinating industry. However, to use Jay's words "the Gods of documentary filmmaking were smiling on us" as the film manages to capture the incident now known as The Montreal Screwjob in its entirety. Now, the screwjob was actually a far more complicated affair than the movie makes out, but it does do a wonderful job of showing us that the wrestling business has sharp teeth and that Vince McMahon's fangs are the sharpest of all... After 14 years with the WWF, during which time Bret had struggled as hard as anyone to make it to the top of his profession, all The Hitman wanted to do was bow out gracefully before he moved to the WCW, (a company that he was so unenthusiastic about working for he'd even turned down a multi-million dollar offer to stay with Vince and the WWF). Instead of being able to leave with his head held high, the company switches on him, forcing him to lose to real-life rival Shawn Michaels in front of his family, his fans and his legendary father, Stu Hart. The WWF had even turned Bret heel (wrestling slang for a bad guy) in an attempt to alienate his fanbase and devalue his character. They had clearly been planning to get rid of him for some time. McMahon just wanted to ruin him first so that WCW would have a harder time promoting him as a star. We know this today, only because it was captured on camera by Paul Jay and High Road Productions. Without this film, Vince McMahon's po-faced fabrications that Bret "sold out" and left for the money, or that he was unwilling to be professional and lose his belt when told to (he just didn't want to lose in Canada or to Shawn Michaels for personal reasons) would have quite possibly become accepted as facts. A touching portrait of Bret Hart in his prime that then gives way to a detailed account of one of the most shocking events in wrestling's long history, Wrestling With Shadows is powerful, earnest and utterly heartbreaking. Exquisitely cinematic, the final scenes of this film will haunt you for years, whether you are a wrestling fan or not.