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.

Mondo Topless shares some stylistic similarities with Jean-Luc Godard's collaborative effort, Le plus vieux métier du monde (The Oldest Trade in the World).

Or only a frenetic drone, an unrelenting meditation on nothingness best put into words by Pat Barringer, the dancer on the electrical tower: 'All that you're doing is a dance it has no meaning whatsoever...'"[3] Roger Ebert wrote Mondo Topless "is in some ways quite an interesting film, especially for the light it sheds on Meyer's attitude to his big-busted actresses" which mostly features "topless dancers in incongruous situations...

"[2] Filmink noted the film "intersperses a LOT of footage of topless dancing with surprisingly interesting first-person accounts of their work and life and makes one wish Meyer had made more documentaries in his career.