Carol Doda
“CAROL DODA TOPLESS AT THE CONDOR” My rating: B- (At the Glenwood Arts)
100 minutes | MPAA rating: R
One of the more obscure outliers of modern American social history gets examined in “Carol Doda Topless at the Condor,” a documentary that succeeds more in recreating a bygone era than in coming to any definitive conclusions about its central figure.
Carol Doda (she died in 2015 at age 78) was, for a decade or so beginning in the mid-1960s. a household name. She was famous/notorious for dancing topless at the Condor Club in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.
Doda was not a stripper. Or even an exotic dancer. She did a standard go-go routine with the difference that she was nude from the waist up.
This was in an era when even burlesque stars wore pasties; by freeing the nipple one might claim that Doda opened the door to a whole new approach to public nudity.
Whether she intended to do so or was just in the right place at the right time is one of many questions Marlo McKenzie and Jonathan Parker’s film leave unanswered.
The film does a nice job of establishing how San Francisco became “the off-season Vegas,” a nightlife center offering tourists a plethora of jazz and comedy clubs that earned the town the nickname “Baghdad by the Bay.”
Carol Doda was a waitress at the Condor Club. But she delivered drinks with a wiggle and exuberant dance movies while wearing a white leotard. Eventually the club’s owners suggested that she might do her dance from atop the grand piano on the bandstand.
At the same time fashion designer Rudy Gernreich was introducing his topless swimsuit (or monokini); Doda and her bosses decided to up the ante by having her dance in the breast-baring outfit. Result: standing-room crowds and queues around the block.
Ere long Doda was making her entrance on a specially rigged piano that lowered from a hole in the ceiling with the star performer already on top and gyrating. And she began beefing up her modest bosom with silicon injections.
Overnight virtually every club in town went topless. The cops responded with a city-wide raid; Doda and her fellow topless dancers prevailed in court and as a result San Francisco became the first city to recognize the legality of topless performance.
“Carol Doda Topless…” eschews narration and instead relies on dozens of talking-head snippets featuring Doda’s old bosses, fellow dancers, even bartenders at clubs where she worked.
There are also a handful of female scholars attempting to establish Doda’s place in the feminist continuum, and they are wildly contradictory. Was Doda exploited or was she a canny exploiter? Was she a photo-feminist? And if so, deliberately or accidentally?
The film employs lots of footage of Doda being interviewed, but it’s just about impossible to pin down her personality. For a woman who nightly bared it all, she was remarkably shy.
“I want to be in show business and I don’t know any other way than showing my bosoms,” she says at one point. In another interview she calls her act “another form of art, like a nude painting or statue.”
So who was this woman? There are hints that she came to San Francisco after a failed marriage, leaving behind one or two children. The movie raises the idea that Doda developed serious health problems as the result of her regular use of silicon injections to maintain her breasts, but never comes to any conclusions.
In interviews she could be self-effacing, but there’s no evidence that irony played a role in her act. She was a naked lady dancing. Period.
Doda never discussed her personal life; even women who worked with her for years knew little about her. She is alleged to have had a liaison with Frank Sinatra; thereafter she preferred young men…one commentator suggests that guys barely out of their teens were more malleable and less troublesome.
In later life, when the topless bookings dropped off, Doda sang with a heavy metal band, did phone porn, developed her own line of face creams and opened a boutique specializing in intimate wear (apparently she would look at a female customer and know immediately what design and size of bra would be appropriate).
Ultimately we’re left with the sense that Carol Doda wanted desperately to be a star despite her lack of conventional talent, and had the insight or blind luck to find the one way to get there.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 