By the Light of the Silvery Moon

TCM is for some reason running a morning and afternoon of Doris Day movies tomorrow, July 18. This, even though her birthday is in April. But, it give me the opportunity where I can finally schedule one of the posts I'd written for a movie that I recorded last August during Summer Under the Stars. That movie is By the Light of the Silvery Moon, which is on TCM at 2:45 PM.

Doris Day is the female lead here as Marjorie Winfield, a tomboyish woman in 1919 small-town Indiana who knows a bit about fixing a car and is the adult daughter in a middle-class family. There's banker father George (Leon Ames); mom and household manager Alice (Rosemary DeCamp), who can afford to have a maid in Stella (Mary Wickes); and obnoxious kid brother Wesley (Billy Gray). It's been almost a year since the end of the Great War, since Thanksgiving is coming up as a plot point in the movie, and Dad reads a story in the local paper that will be certain to please Marjorie: soldier Bill Sherman (Gordon MacRae) is coming home.

If you recall from On Moonlight Bay (immediately preceding By the Light of the Silvery Moon at 1:00 PM), Marjorie and Bill had been girl- and boyfriend before the war, with Dad not certain Marjorie should marry him then. But two years have passed and audiences might not have remembered that part of On Moonlight Bay. Besides, having to fight that nasty Kaiser should have softened Bill's radical views. Everybody's looking for normalcy now. So with Bill coming home, it would finally be a good time for him and Marjorie to get married and live happily ever after, or at least until their children have to go off and fight World War II.

But there's a catch. Bill has been doing a lot of thinking since he's last been in Indiana. He still wants to marry Marjorie. But he wants to be able to do it on solid financial footing. For him, that means coming into the marriage with a bit of a nest egg already, which, having been in the war, he decidedly does not have. So he tells Marjorie he'll marry her, as long as she's willing to wait. Marjorie can see the logic in that, although it's going to be an on-again, off-again thing until the requisite happy ending in the final reel.

The subplot, which also affects Bill's and Marjorie's thoughts about when the two of them should get married, involves the relationship between George and Alice. George, as an executive at the local bank, is in charge of the decision on what to do with some local properties the bank holds the rights to. An acting troupe is coming through town, led by Renee LaRue, and they're thinking about renting a theater the bank currently owns. However, George wants to see the play the troupe is looking to put on before going ahead with the lease, since this is a conservative town. As such, he finds a passage about divorce in the play and wants that edited.

However, in one of those things that can only be a misunderstanding in the movies or a TV sitcom, the kids and Stella find George's message to LaRue. They don't know anything about the play, and get the impression that George has fallen in love with Miss LaRue and is thinking about divorcing Alice, which would cause a major scandal in town. Marjorie finds it so unbearable that it even has her put off getting married to Bill. The misunderstanding, like the relationship between Marjorie and Bill, snowballs out of control until it can be resolved at the end of the film.

It is once again easy to see why Warner Bros. wanted to reunite Doris Day and Gordon MacRae not just in another movie, but in one that's a follow-up to On Moonlight Bay. Both of them are good for the old-timey nostalgia that On Moonlight Bay gave audiences who definitely wanted it in the early 1950s especially since the US had once again found itself at war, this time in Korea. However, By the Light of the Silvery Moon isn't quite as good as On Moonlight Bay. I think it's because, to me, the plot feels more contrived. Also, I think by 1953 the nostalgia for the 1920s was beginning to run out of steam. It's not that anybody here is bad so much as the script which is getting creaky. Still, anybody up for nostalgia, or who likes Doris Day, is probably going to find By the Light of the Silvery Moon pleasant enough.