A more-of-the-same retread of 1951’s On Moonlight Bay, By the Light of the Silvery Moon tells the story of Marjorie Winfield (Doris Day) and her on-again, off-again betrothal to boyfriend, Bill Sherman (Gordon MacRae) who has returned from the Great War to a picket-fenced small town in Indiana. Concurrently, due to a misunderstanding Marjorie’s bank manager Dad (Leon Ames, as ever, playing the stick-in-the-mud paterfamilias) is suspected of cheating on his wife (Rosemary DeCamp) with a French “actress”.
Despite the Edwardian setting (according to the opening credits the script draws on Booth Tarkington's "Penrod" stories ) the concerns are pure 1950s with the overarching preoccupation with marriage and respectability being slightly questioned by a sense of burgeoning female independence. Although genial enough the thin storyline is dragged on far too long with an abundance of Zeitgeist-typical contrivance.