Carol Doda Topless at the Condor: The Saga of an Accidental Revolutionary
By Kim Hughes
Rating: B-
For someone who tangentially influenced public policy, popular ideas about nudity, and notions of female agency over their bodies, Carol Doda wasn’t much of an agitator.
As the documentary Carol Doda Topless at the Condor makes clear, Doda was simply someone who longed to be on stage. And in San Francisco in 1964, the shortest route to that goal from where a workaday cocktail waitress and dancer like Doda stood was doffing her top and displaying her breasts.
And so, she did it in grand style at a club called The Condor. There, Doda —perched on a white baby grand piano that was lowered from the ceiling — emerged wearing stockings, heels, panties, and a sly smile. Also initially, wearing something called the “monokini swimsuit,” fashion designer Rudi Gernreich’s ridiculous but blatantly provocative strappy, peekaboo creation.
What made Doda a sensation — and a bona fide tourist attraction whose act grabbed international headlines — was not her grassroots activism or her fierce campaigning for change. It was timing. She was the first woman to dance topless, at least in such a striking, above-ground way.
Progressives ran with it as a statement on female power while conservatives pointed to it as proof that society was crumbling. Doda just shimmied and surfed the publicity wave. Meanwhile, celebrities from Walter Cronkite to Liberace (with his mother in tow!) made The Condor the place to see and be seen in the city.
As the doc shows, the San Fran of 1964, like other places around the U.S., was teetering on a new era where drugs, sex, music, and politics were coalescing into an identifiable youth-led movement as never before. Anti-heroes like Doda fit right in alongside Black performers gaining favour with white audiences. (A young Sly Stone makes an appearance here as does singer Bobby Freeman, credited with launching “the swim” dance craze).
What also made Doda a sensation was her commitment to her assets, which led to harmful silicone injections, ballooning her breasts from size 34 to 44 and foreshadowing invasive, often grotesque body recontouring that would eventually overtake the porn industry before bleedings into the mainstream.
The film’s best parts, apart from abundant vintage footage and those groovy 60s-era threads, are recollections from those at ground zero, like club operators as well as performers Jimi and Judy Mamou. Like Doda, they were a dazzling part of San Fran’s fabled North Beach nightclub scene — he as a musician, she as an exotic dancer whose act included a live boa constrictor.
Elsewhere, juicy anecdotes abound. There’s the story of Frank Sinatra flying Doda to his Cal-Neva resort on his private plane for dalliances, sneaking her through underground tunnels built for his surveillance-averse gangster buddies. And how Andy Warhol would invite her to hang out with his entourage whenever he was in San Fran. Meanwhile, others from the era paint a picture of a time when anything seemed possible, and topless dancers were too novel to be saddled with stigma. Doda seemed weirdly impervious to it all.
Doda’s background — she died in 2015 age 78 — is mostly unexplored here; the filmmakers seem committed to capturing a moment in time with Doda as their narrative axis rather than delving into her specific backstory, which likely wasn’t all that notable until she arrived on North Beach’s main drag. But who knows?
One of the film’s producers is Metallica drummer and longtime Bay Area resident Lars Ulrich, and keeners will hear instrumental strains of “Nothing Else Matters” late in the film. Good trivia, sure but, like much of what’s here, it’s inconsequential overall.
More riveting: the Toronto and Vancouver opening screenings are prefaced by live burlesque shows. Yes!
Carol Doda Topless at the Condor. Co-directed by Marlo McKenzie and Jonathan Parker. With Carol Doda, Jimi Mamou, and Judy Mamou. In theatres April 5 at Cineplex Yonge & Dundas (Toronto), The Rio and the VIFF Centre (Vancouver), The Playhouse (Hamilton), The Metro Cinema (Edmonton), The Mayfair Theatre (Ottawa), and The Princess (Waterloo) and opening in other cities throughout the spring.