beyondasiaphilia

Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Carol Doda Topless At The Condor film review

San Francisco’s North Beach is right next to Chinatown, so growing up in the Bay Area I vividly remember seeing the giant neon sign at the Condor Club at Columbus and Broadway every time my family made the trek to the city for a wedding banquet or a red egg party. I always wondered who the woman in the billboard was and why she had bright red lightbulbs on her bra but of course it was not to be discussed with my parents or any other adults who happened to be driving the car. Once I got older I learned who Carol Doda was in a general sort of way but I didn’t know too many details about her life or how she came to have her likeness in lights at a club in North Beach, so I was happy to learn more via the new documentary, CAROL DODA TOPLESS AT THE CONDOR (dir. Marlo McKenzie and Jonathan Parker), which takes its name from that very neon sign that mystified me as a kid. Doda started her career as a go-go dancer and cocktail waitress there back in the early 1960s and when she became the first performer to go topless in 1964 she became a sensation.

The film does a good job evoking the time and place when San Francisco was the hippest place around. In the early 60s the beatniks were fading away and the hippies had not yet taken over, but San Francisco was still the place to go for vacationing Midwesterners looking for edgy entertainment. Doda was at the center of the scene and people lined up around the block to see her dance and sing in her g-string. The film tells her story through interviews with Doda’s contemporaries as well as from archival interviews with Doda herself (she died in 2015) and features copious amounts of archival footage from back in the day.

For the most part, like most biographical documentaries the film emphasizes the positive. It hints at a bit of the darker side of Doda’s story including her unhappy marriage at a young age and her estrangement from her children from that marriage and there is one scary shot of the very large needle used for silicone breast enhancement (Doda went from a 34B cup to a 44DD using silicone). There’s also a harrowing tale of a fellow dancer who developed gangrene in her breasts because the silicone blocked her milk ducts when she tried to nurse her infant, but the film isn’t an expose of the wrongdoings of the boob job industry. Instead it focuses on the perspective of Doda and the other dancers interviewed who describe the financial and personal freedom that topless (and later bottomless/nude) dancing afforded them. The movie frames Doda as a proto-feminist who actively chose her profession and places her in the context of the sexual revolution, the Summer of Love, and the women’s liberation movement, arguing for the agency and self-determination of Doda and her fellow dancers. 

The film also traces the rise and fall of North Beach, which by the 1980s had become a much seedier place, as illustrated by the questionable death of Jimmy “The Beard” Ferrozzo, one of the managers at the Condor. Ferrozzo had some unfortunate encounters with organized crime and in 1983 he was crushed to death after hours one night by the hydraulic piano that Doda danced on top of in her show. The film also points out that in the 60s, couples and businessmen made up a big part of the audience at Doda’s shows, but by the 80s it was primarily single dudes, probably in raincoats. 

All in all the film is a fascinating, wide-ranging and entertaining look at the era, with Carol Doda literally emboding that era. It’s a fun watch and it satisfied my curiosity about that giant neon sign and the woman that it represented.

March 21, 2024 at 5:05 am Leave a comment