By 1954 Lili St. Cyr was known, and almost every inch of her body had been seen, by eye of the public. St. Cyr was perhaps the most renowned stripper of the 1950s, and the little that helped thrust her name and body into the public arena were burlesque films. These movies were not sanitized Hollywood representations of burley shows but were instead recordings of authentic performances complete with striptease dances captured on for the movie market. The burlesque thrived on the fringes of American cinema in the years following the end of World War II, conveying the unvarnished sexual spectacle forbidden in movies governed by the Production Code. But because of their low nature and marginal status vis-a'-vis mainstream product, burlesque movies have been ignored by historians as well as other scholars of the postwar period. This article has two primary purposes. First, it serves as an introduction to a largely forgotten body of theatrical films made and exhibited in the United States from the period roughly bounded by 1945 and 1960. Burlesque movies were situated within the broader context of films, a form that paralleled the classical Hollywood studio era but dealt with those subjects forbidden by state and municipal censorship and the mainstream industry's self-regulatory mechanisms: sex hygiene, nudity, drug use, and so on. Although the term exploitation film has changed over time to include all manner of low-budget films,