Mondo Topless

Mondo Topless (1966)

** (out of 4)

This film starts off as a nutty documentary of San Francisco but quickly turns into a tour of the lovely, big breasted strippers of the city. Thankfully this film runs just 60-minutes because anything longer would have really killed the entertainment factor even with the hour running time pushing its limits. The movie is set up as some sort of documentary but being from Meyer you know very well what it's going to be about. We see countless beautiful and big breasted women dance, jiggle and just bounce their breasts all over the screen and while this is certainly fun to watch, it does grow boring before the half-hour mark. The most interesting (look wise) woman is certainly one called Bouncy Babette Bardot who does a few nice tricks with her you guessed it. I think what really kills the entertainment is that we have these strippers telling us their stories and who in the hell wants to hear them? None of the stories are very interesting and all lean towards the boring side. This certainly isn't a bad movie but the director has much better work out there to be seen.

Although Russ Meyer made this movie in a hurry to make some fast money, he later came to see it for what it is - a classic sendup of the go-go and striptease girls of the swingin' 60's! The movie is sparse, even by Russ Meyer standards - just a music soundtrack accompanied by an announcer who introduces the "girls"!

But the "girls" are something else! Most of them are California based professional strippers of the era who jumped at the chance to get in front of a movie camera and do their go-go bad thing. All of them are eye catching, but one stands out, literally, from the rest.

Russ was actually ready to run this film through his paces, featuring the already well known Lorna Maitland, when he got a phone call from a great "procurer" friend, one Andy Anderson. He told Russ that he had a major discovery in front of him at a strip club in downtown Los Angeles (San Francisco has been incorrectly reported) and that Russ should "get his body down to a certain club a.s.a.p." in order to be the first to shoot her. Andy said "I'll hold the dogs off until you get here!"

Russ complied, went to the club and together, he and Andy went to the dressing room of one Vivian Cournoyer. She had apparently just begun dancing at the club and was new to the art of striptease and the area, temporarily staying with a friend. Identifying himself, Russ asked Ms. Cournoyer to display the goods whereupon Russ got to see, according to him, "the greatest set of breasts I've ever seen or filmed", all the more remarkable on a petite 112 pound body!

Realizing he had to act quickly in order to be the first to get this buxotic lady on film, Russ Meyer drove with her to the desert early the next morning and spent the entire day shooting stills and film of the woman he called Darlene Grey for his ode to the go-go era, MONDO TOPLESS. Darlene Grey went on to a short-lived career in magazines such as Arv Miller's FLING, posing as Candy Morrison, Vivian Moyer and Angela Carter.

Then, as Russ tells it, she just disappeared from sight after less than a year of posing. Nevertheless, Russ Meyer still claims that MONDO TOPLESS has been one of his best selling videos over the years "simply because of Ms. Grey's great heaving chest".

If for no other reason, enjoy this movie for the "girls", but especially for the extended "desert boogie au go go" done by Darlene Grey near the beginning. No less a film critic than Roger Ebert felt compelled to specifically comment on the voluptuous Ms. Grey in MONDO TOPLESS. Seeing her cavort, topless in the desert, holding a tiny AM transistor radio in one hand is an experience never to be forgotten!

I couldn't help but laugh out loud while watching MONDO TOPLESS. The overexuberant descriptive narration along with the busty women's epileptic dancing gave the movie a kind of surreal, comical effect. Visually, there are some stunning shots (the woman dancing next to the incoming train) and the wacky yet clever narration parodies everything about the late 60s, 70s sexual revolution. So, clearly, Russ Meyer ain't no idiot. There's a method to his madness. But the movie gets a bit boring after a while. And many of the women look odd, due mainly to the dated hair styles and attitude. But it's worth a look just for the oddity of it all.

I am sure the now dead Yugoslavian dictator, Marshall Tito, would have had no objections to me renaming this movie so. Though I do think he himself could have appeared in it: his breasts were larger than some that we see here...

"Mondo Bimbo" has a great mid-60s feel to it, a colourful and vivacious style that is sorely lacking in today's often overly polished, sometimes sterile-looking movies - not to mention breasts that are REAL. (Oh, them da good ol' days that I never lived through...) No implants filled with dead chemical matter, sticking out of very small breasts, trying to escape their captivity, protesting their imprisonment by impersonating badly blown-up balloons; no, not here.

Still, all's not entirely perfect in the world of the 60s dancing harlots. These braindead women need dancing lessons like Paris Hilton needs a lobotomy. In fact, I take that back: I'd much rather have preferred that none of them danced at all. All that motion distracts from what the title tells us this world is really all about (which it is, in a way). Couldn't Russ have told them to keep still just for a single second? Sure, some of them do: some just stare into the camera emptily, grinning like pleased rhinos, but most of them prance around like deranged Elvis impersonators, to the rhythms of often annoying and ear-splitting jazz and blues music.

Someone here wrote that "no-one wants to hear these strippers talk". How wrong he is... After all, this movie would have been too dull with just breasts bouncing left and right. Some of the things Russ's bimbos say are quite amusing. I very much doubt that this stuff was scripted: it just seems so painfully honest, so utterly moronic, hence those must have been genuine thoughts exiting the empty heads of these mostly very pretty women.

And the winner for Movie's Best Pair Of Breasts goes to... the English-looking woman rolling in mud (also the largest pair). At one point she said that "Playboy Magazine" had rejected her because "my bust-line was too big". I always did hate Hugh Heffner; a niveau riche peasant with no sense of what does or doesn't make a woman beautiful. That magazine is strictly for fans of plastic bimbos...

'Mondo Topless' is Russ Meyer's pseudo documentary that starts out with snapshots from San Fransisco with narrator (John Furlong) praises the city's progress. Images of San Fransisco is cleverly cut with seemingly unnecessary shots of topless woman driving the car. It doesn't take long when the film turns its focus on different strippers dancing and their recorded conversations about their thoughts and troubles.

'Mondo Topless' is visually beautiful film (in here I don't mean the nudity, but cinematography) with many interesting shots. Almost monotonous monologues of strippers over the groovy pop-rock and girls dancing gives the film quite surreal feel. The humor is subtle as left hook from Mike Tyson. The film keeps its tone and rhythm all the 60 minutes, and by the last quarter, it starts to get little bit boring.

Russ Meyer is much more talented and smarter than many think based on his films, and 'Mondo Topless' proves his intelligence besides the love of big bosoms.