Moonbeam (Terry Gibson) is the daughter of the pig keeper Mr Swyner (Bruce Kimball) and she likes nothing better than a long conversation with her favourite piglet, which she conducts in depth in the pigpen. Well, there is one thing she likes more, but her parents want her to be married now she is nineteen years old, someone to take her off their hands and do the decent thing, make a respectable woman of her. It may be too late for that as she enjoys passing the time when not in discussion with the piglet having sex with local yokel Jasper (John Keith), though he is currently more interested in persuading another girl, Pretty Patty (Peggy Church) to give up her virginity to him. Will he succeed?
For a movie named after the pig keeper's daughter, this didn't half get distracted by other characters for most of the time, as after we have been treated to her sex scene with Jasper she disappeared from the storyline until the last fifteen minutes. This was one of director Bethel Buckalew's softcore hicksploitation movies of which he was apparently fond, having helmed a number of them around this point in time, a genre which in rather more sexually toned down fashion came to dominate American drive-in cinema for the whole decade, stretching from the popularity of country music and comedy showcase Hee Haw to the tailing off of The Dukes of Hazzard in success.
Those were on television, but in between audiences lapped up a whole run of Burt Reynolds movies and many more imitators, the appeal being the lack of pretension and jokes that anybody could get, along with an enthusiastic attitude to sexuality supposedly born of that healthy country air leading the rural folks' minds to matters of the flesh, and possibly because they didn't have a whole lot of other things to do for entertainment. Recognising this attraction, producer Harry Novak was never one to allow an opportunity to pass him by in his field of specialisation, which was softcore sex often with a comedic flavour, and thus you had the example here where some cast members willing to disrobe were assembled to pretend to have sex for the camera.
Although in some cases you were not entirely sure that they were simulating the acts, and there are those of the opinion that Novak had snuck hardcore under the noses of the censors merely because Buckalew had not included any closeups of what they may have actually been doing. There were certainly shots where at a distance it was difficult to tell, but this might have been part of the rumour mill movies have capitalised upon ever since sex scenes became part of the vocabulary of cinema for grown-ups. What was clear was that if this had been made a mere few months later, Novak might have generated more profits by making it hardcore anyway as censorship was relaxed and porn became a major moneymaker, almost going mainstream.
Back at The Pig Keeper's Daughter, the plot was essentially an excuse to mount the couplings between the small cast, though the most colourful character was the salesman (Peter James) who is introduced singing a song about the benefits of travelling the highways and byways ostensibly to sell his wares but with the bonus of bedding various ladies along the way. Curiously, he's not been on the screen two minutes before finding himself in a very old dirty joke about encountering a naked man bent over on the road who explains he has been assaulted and tied up in a most unfortunate position, whereupon the salesman informs him it's his unlucky day and - well, it cuts to the next scene, but you can imagine what entailed. In the main, this was a bunch of maybe not the greatest-looking people to appear in a movie obviously hired to take their clothes off and make believe they were indulging in intercourse for our entertainment, though with every one of those sequences dragging on to tedious length the novelty wore off well before the hour mark.
