Mondo Topless is a 1966 pseudo-documentary directed by Russ Meyer, featuring Babette Bardot and Lorna Maitland among others. It marked Meyer's return to color filmmaking following a two-year "Gothic period" of black-and-white "roughies" (most notably Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! [1965]) that were primarily marketed toward the drive-in theater circuit and deemphasized nudity and other sexual content in favor of exaggerated violence. While a straightforward sexploitation film, the film owes some debt to the French New Wave and cinéma vérité traditions, and is known to some under the titles Mondo Girls and Mondo Top.

Plot

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.