Like many cute, thin and semi-nostalgia-based documentaries, this one will hold little appeal for the large, largely young, ticket-buying public. Nor will even most Baby Boomers take to eighty-three minutes of feisty senior ladies whose talk is larded with four-letter words. Catty, out-front, restricted as to audience, Lipstick & Dynamite does, however, offer up reflections on memories, on age’s bittersweet acceptance of the faded glamour of youth, and on women of independence who lived their way and are strong survivors.

At one time subtitled Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling, the project began -- and is to be completed by the fictional The Pin-Down Girl -- when a friend told Ruth Leitman about female wrestlers back before World War Two. The topic turned into “obsession,” and, after subsequently interviewing a number of the subjects, the Art Institute of Chicago doc film teacher determined to capture their history, and their present, in this work on which she is also co-producer, -editor, and -camerawoman.

Apart from current economic disparities among them, these pioneering women’s stories are in ways similar in that, restless, sometimes abused, small-towners, they saw the carnival and arena wrestling spotlight as sparkle, independence, a means to get out and away, travel, be their own women. They were pretty, and pretty young, so that they were taken advantage of financially, on occasion sexually, comes as no surprise. There is not a lot here on the early farm lives they fled as “baby farmer, strong, athletic, stupid.” Focus falls, instead, on the ladies as they are today, interspersed with b&w footage (once or twice contrasted with today’s sex-glamour sport), news clips, related period television shows like What’s My Line? and To Tell the Truth, and, used too often, a 1951 clinker about girl wrestlers and illegal bookmaking, Racket Girls (Pin-down Girls).

To those who remember the Pabst Blue Ribbon Friday night fights, names like Antonino “Barefoot Boy from the Pampas” Rocca, “Haystacks” Calhoun, “Man-Mountain” Dean, “Gorgeous” George, George Maharias, are familiar, but the film’s ladies aver that, though not allowed to wrestle legally in some major venues, they were the attractions who really brought in customers. Hindsight and readjusted sensibilities bring winces of dismay, along with chuckles, at the blatant sexist practices of a half-century ago and the hammy running commentaries of all-male announcers. But this is more than balanced by the septua- and octogenarian ladies who occupy most of the screen time, tough, sure and proud, often critical of yet loving one another, survivors all whatever their present situations.

Several of the women figure more prominently than others. Foremost is The Great Moolah, self-touted undefeated women’s world champion for twenty-nine years, once billed as “Slave Girl with the Elephant Boy,” ex-wife of promoter (“really a promoter of flesh”) Billy Wolfe, mentor of others, six times grand- and great-grandmother. Her nom de guerre eminently appropriate, the supremely self-confident Moolah has grown well-off as a promoter in her own right, amazingly still enters the ring once in a while despite heart surgery, and lives downstairs in her large South Carolina home with former midget wrestler Diamond ‘Lil, The Great Mae Young occupying the upstairs.

Other lights of that era seem to live well enough, too, but at the opposite extreme is legendary Gladys “Killem” Gillem, who started out in 1939, fought opponents of both sexes as well as alligators and bears from 1942 to 1962, and lives wizened and wrinkled in rural poverty with few hard feelings. Trading obscenities and fishing with her one son “no one will marry,” she remembers making love under open skies with a man who truly loved her and assesses her career and other female wrestlers as she is driven to a reunion that seems to be at Moolah’s place but winds up in crowded and star-studded Mobile (perhaps there are two?).

Speaking of their and others’ lives in this neglected sports-entertainment field, or later careers as security guards or Senior Olympics swimmers, of cancer or occupational-hazard knee operations or a propensity for “marry[ing] alcoholics or needy people,” these women radiate the strength and humor that have enabled them to be the “girls” they still call each other, as well as not just survivors but winners. Collectively, the Lady is a Champ.

But while they themselves are interesting, the general story is limited and, finally, of too slight a treatment to merit an entire feature. 

(Released by Koch Lorber Films; not rated by MPAA.)