MONDO TOPLESS

The film presents a snapshot of mid-1960s San Francisco before shifting its focus to strippers, particularly in the context of the city's incipient topless go-go dancing craze. (This seminal manifestation of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s attenuated the coquettish tableaux and swing music-underpinned élan of American burlesque-era striptease and its immediate derivations in favor of a pruriently libidinous style generally informed by contemporaneous rock and soul rhythms; at this juncture, dancers generally remained partially clothed below the waist, although this would evolve in subsequent decades.) The strippers' lives are earnestly portrayed as they reveal the day-to-day realities of sex work, ruminate over their respective bra sizes and articulate their preferences in men, all voiced over while dancing topless to an instrumental surf-style soundtrack. Throughout the film, the narrator talks about the performers as if their "topless movement" is a subculture of the broader counterculture of the 1960s, somewhat tangential to the unbridled cultural transmogrifications of the beatnik and hippie movements of the epoch.