It’s Carnival time in New Orleans, when civic pride is its most glowingly beautiful. This is not always an easy city to live in, but it is an easy city to love, and Mardi Gras is our annual reminder of how wonderful it can be at its best. It’s also an annual reminder that its wonders & beauty have never changed in any significant way. The dozens of Carnival seasons I’ve celebrated all feel part of one grand hedonistic continuum, set against the unchanging backdrop of centuries-old French Quarter facades. It’s a rejuvenating ritual that helps me combat the “Ain’t dere no more” nostalgia of grumps who complain that the city isn’t the same as it used to be since Katrina, or since the ’70s, or since whenever that particular grump happened to be in their carefree twenties. People change, governments change, but the city stays the same, like how a river keeps its name even as new water flows through it.

There are much less expensive, exhausting ways to be reminded of this grand New Orleanian continuum than attending Mardi Gras in-person. You could also just watch a movie. Any picture filmed in the French Quarter, regardless of purpose or quality, is a documentary about the city’s temporal stasis. The opening montage of 1954’s semi-nudie cutie Naughty New Orleans takes that mission more seriously than most, explaining the allure of “the city that care forgot […] where life is lived at a different pace” in overly formal newsreel narration. Of course, this narration is illustrated by a slideshow of French Quarter architecture, which looks exactly the same now as it did 70 years ago, give or take changes in fashion among the day-drinking pedestrians and hand-painted advertisements that adorn it. That is, until the movie settles on Bourbon Street, which has been unofficially annexed from the city proper and now exclusively belongs to the tourists.

Naughty New Orleans is less of a feature film than it is a lengthy tourism ad for the Bourbon Street strip club strip. Its poster is drowning in ad copy, enticing viewers to “actually visit the heart of world-famed French Quarter” where we’ll be treated to “delightful adult entertainment, exactly as seen by millions of visitors from across the world [….] a sophisticated treat with the girls you’ll meet on Bourbon Street.” Bourbon Street is still anchored by strip bars and dance clubs today, but the “adult entertainment” dancing style therein has changed dramatically. If you want to see burlesque, you have to flock to nerdier spaces like The AllWays Lounge on St Claude Ave, where actual New Orleanians drink. Bourbon Street strip clubs are where men from Ohio get blackout drunk to half-remember pole dances that would’ve been identical to what’s offered back in Cleveland, just now with commemorative plastic beads.

A document of stripping-fashions past, Naughty New Orleans is a vintage Bourbon Street striptease revue set to somber jazz and routinely interrupted by hack comedy routines & whispers of a plot. Set inside the “Ain’t dere no more” Bourbon Street club The Moulin Rouge, the core of the film is a series of burlesque acts akin to what I’ve seen performed in more recent years at The AllWays and One Eyed Jacks. Occasionally, a dancer will perform a superheroic feat like simultaneously helicoptering four independent tassels on her bra & panties in opposing directions, but mostly they just put on and take off their gartered stockings one leg at a time, just like everybody else. If you can ignore the heavily laugh-tracked, light-on-actual-laughs comedy sketches that interrupt those dance routines, it’s a warmly pleasant, classically smutty good time.

The ideal version of Naughty New Orleans would’ve continued the overly verbose newsreel narration throughout and strictly stuck to the striptease revue format in the mondo-movie fashion of a Mondo Topless or a Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield. Instead, the film is flimsily held together by a story involving a star dancer’s deception of her out-of-town boyfriend, who believes she works as a “night secretary” until he stumbles into her headlining act at The Moulin Rouge. That’s it; that’s the entire story. The boyfriend is delighted instead of angered, to the dancer’s relief, then returns to his hometown while she pines from her French Quarter bedroom for another male visitor, leading the audience on through open implication. If the movie hadn’t bothered with that plotline and cut out the comedy routines to make more room for French Quarter strip shows & tourist photos, it might’ve really been something. Oh well.

Naughty New Orleans is best enjoyed as background noise on Tubi while folding laundry, only glancing up when the funeral-jazz hits the soundtrack so you know someone’s about to strip. The crowd reaction shots during those strip shows are a spectacle worth seeing in their own right, even if they are chaotically inserted images of toothless men & overdressed women repeating the same drunken, knowing grins for 77 haphazard minutes. It’s also a movie best enjoyed if you already have an affection for New Orleans as a temporal anomaly. You might not be able to recreate the exact night out advertised here on Bourbon Street in particular, but you can pass by these same buildings on your walk to a classic burlesque show on one of Bourbon’s less-crowded tributaries. The city is still—as the poster advertises—”tranquil by day, naughty by nite,” same as it ever was.

-Brandon Ledet