Los Angeles teenager Gail Macaulay is going steady with deliveryman Chuck, a relationship that sparks jealousy in her younger sister Joan.

When Joan needs her birth certificate in order to obtain summer employment, her mother Lois tells her to look in a box in her dresser, where the girl discovers Gail's adoption papers.

The following morning, Lois tells Gail her biological father was killed in an accident before she was born, but her mother, Gert Lynch, is alive.

At the graduation ceremony, Gail imbues her senior class Vice President speech about citizenship with a loving message about the true meaning of family, to the delight of her parents, sisters, and Chuck.

Farley Granger thought the script was "pointless and meandering", but as a Goldwyn contract player, he faced suspension if he refused to make the film.

[2] Jane Wyatt, on loan from 20th Century Fox, was disappointed to find herself cast as an advice-dispensing mother after having played a succession of sophisticated roles opposite Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and Gregory Peck.