There’s a biopic out about a woman from just down the road in Coffeyville, and I’d never heard of her before seeing this movie, so whatever else I have to say, I have to be grateful for the fact that Queen of the Ring taught me about Mildred Burke.
Burke turns out to be an incredibly fascinating person… who deserves a much better movie made about her. The film’s not atrocious, but its troubles are constant and glaring and hard to ignore, especially in a movie that runs around 135 minutes. As the movie tells it, Mildred Burke was introduced to professional wrestling while working at her mother’s diner in Wichita in the 1930s. She was captivated and decided to make it her life, which she did, joining the pro wrestling ranks and becoming massively successful on the circuit, and being at least partly responsible for the expansion of professional wrestling opportunities for women.
Much of her career is intertwined with her promoter, Billy Wolfe, who is also her husband, and a cad, which is something that’s clear from the start. And Mildred probably knows it, but that's not clear, at the start or for a very long time after. And part of that is because the people in the movie are written broadly and very much not deeply— they are all, basically, the words on the page, and those words, by and large, are clunky and cliched and obvious, flaws that extend to too many other aspects of the movie, with its endless needle drops and imitations of other, better movies. Whether all of this infected the actors, too, or if they were simply directed this way, the performances are, almost to a person, uncomfortably wooden.
But the movie feels far more at home when people aren't talking to each other— the wrestling scenes are plenty watchable, and sometimes even a little exciting. And we're drawn in when we see Billy and Mildred building their national business, which, as much as anything, made me want to know more. And that, I always appreciate.
Queen of the Ring is in theaters March 7th.
