Hitman Hart: Wrestling in the Shadows
For years Pro-wrestling has made money by staging fights and fueling them with fake feuds and real blood. Today there’s more — wrestlers sell sex too.

"Hitman Hart: Wrestling in the Shadows" helps explain how professional wrestling gradually got sleazier in the late 1990s, right around the time Bret "Hitman Hart" lost his World Federation Championship title.

Hart - a Canadian known for his perma-wet long curly hair, round mirrored-shades and black-and-pink gear - was champion of the WWF on and off for much of the 1990s. This documentary provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the business side of professional wrestling and how it chewed up and spit out Bret Hart.

Canadian director Paul Jay, also, and just as importantly, captures the fascinating family history of the wrestling-prone Hart clan and its masochistic patriarch, Stu, who specializes in "stretches", or eyeball-blood-vessel-bursting submission holds.

"Everyday I was stretched pretty good," says Stu Hart, about the time he spent in a foster home, a place where he fell in with a group of young wrestlers who liked to apply submission holds and teach others to apply them.

Soon enough Stu had his own family. He clamped submission holds on his son Bret and anybody else he invited home from the gym to work out in the family basement. It was known as the dungeon. Inside the dungeon is where Stu literally stretched people to the limit to see how much pain they could endure; or "how much of a man" they were.

Overall, the darker sides of the WWF (today known as World Wrestling Entertainment) dominate the film. Its owner, Vince McMahon, goes out of his way to stick it to Hart as he leaves the WWF to join Ted Turner’s competing network, World Championship Wrestling. Emotions get amplified because of Hart’s desire to keep the sport on higher moral ground, one suitable for its younger fans; while McMahon is only just discovering the power of mixing soap opera-style sex scenarios with wrestling.

McMahon’s path leads to sky-high television ratings, ratings his WWE maintains today. Hart’s choices bring him a blind-sided betrayal from McMahon and embarrassment in front of his hometown Canadian fans.

"I have no sympathy for Brett whatsoever," says McMahon, sporting a black eye in a television interview several days after the Montreal match. "I have no sympathy for someone not doing the right thing for the business that made him Bret, screwed Bret."

Want to know what happened? It's pretty damn good and it does involve a submission hold. "Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows," is showing this month exclusively on The Documentary Channel.

Gregory Crofton