Mondo Topless

I was very excited to see this movie because of the title but it took me a really long time to find it on DVD. It is quite good and you do get to see quite a lot of female nudity I was really thinking there would be more. With a name like that you would really expect to see lots of breasts all the way through, not just sometimes so I want to write this review to warn people that it's not quite what you might be expecting. However, once you accept this it is pretty funny and not rubbish just not quite what I was hoping for. Also the women look a bit the same, having said that they do have great hair and shoes. Since watching this film I have really got into watching films with girls in high heels so in some ways, though it wasn't quite what it could have been it did open me up to new ways of appreciating the female form.

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...

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.

This is a really great movie, hilarious! The narrator is just ridiculous, they keep calling it "the art of the topless" and how the girls are skilled in the art. Its a good movie to pull out when you have people over and need something to entertain everyone. Basically, its just girls who are topless talking about their jobs or other various things in their lives. It's pretty soft core & the most mischievous things one of the girls says is "When I go to bed, I don't wear a brassiere". The things the girls say are stupid but the movie is pretty caked in satire. The narrator actually says "try to concentrate on this girl as she's talking to you", its a joke! Old style movie but definitely worth it. Plus, it's entertaining! O & A party rock!