Don Davis, known for his series of Marsha Jordan '60s soft porn vehicles, hits the bullseye with THE MUTHERS, an unfortunately forgotten movie. I liked it better than his later Jordan pictures and it deserves to be more widely known. A followup film with the same two female leads, 1969's THE DAISY CHAIN, is apparently lost.
The story and ensemble acting make THE MUTHERS a cut above the competition, and perhaps even on a par with Joe Sarno's more famous output from this period.
Jason Hunter's script posits a whole lot of swinging in L.A., covering both the parents and the young generation. With a local bar run by porn stalwart Steve Vincent as the meet market, housewives Marsha Jordan and Virginia Gordon enjoy picking up men for one-night stands. However, we soon discover that Jordan's square-seeming hubby is dallying with Gordon, leading to fireworks and ruin when Gordon's nubile daughter (scene-stealing puffy nipple queen Victoria Bond) taunts Jordan's daughter Kathy Williams with news of the your dad/my mom affair.
Along the way Davis stages an impressive pool party orgy for the younger generation where the simulated sex is hot and one easily spots the handsome Alain Patrick as one of the humping boy friends (there is a dangling screen credit for fictitious "Jean Deaux" which most likely would be a pseudonym for the French-Canadian actor-director). Filmmakers at this time were not overly worried about accusations of "kiddie porn", as Bond mentions her mom being only 32 years old, which would definitely make her character underage.
Also most impressive in a big-bust femme cast is a Davis regular Linda O'Bryant as Linda, another horny housewife (who also appears in the elusive THE DAISY CHAIN opposite Marsha Jordan again). Her huge orbs should have merited some sort of cult following.
As a testament to the film's craftsmanship and excellent pacing, I was actually surprised when it ended on a dramatic note, expecting another reel or two of beautiful femmes disrobing and coupling. That's a pretty rare occurrence for this genre of film, generally all padding and no content. Perhaps a clue to the film's lapse into obscurity is its absence of explicitness -for 1968 the omission of any full-frontal nude shots, and men generally keeping their underwear (or bathing suits) on was behind the times. Another oddity is (at least on my cursory view) having star Kathy Williams (playing Jordan's daughter) not showing any skin here even though her career consists of skin flicks.
