With the coming of summer, three high school buddies--Kenny Leeds, Mike Decker, and Tommy Kingsley--anticipate their initiation into the pleasures of manhood. But Kenny is separated from his friends and sent to stay with his grandparents in Buffalo while his father, a widowed salesman, leaves on a business trip with his secretary-fiancée. Bored and alone in a strange city, Kenny writes his two friends letters about his adventures at "Rosie's," a fictitious brothel across the Canadian border in Niagara Falls. His lie quickly backfires.

High Tor is a 1936 play by Maxwell Anderson. Twenty years after the original production, Anderson adapted it into a television musical with Arthur Schwartz. Anderson first considered a musical adaptation of High Tor for television in 1949. He and John Monks Jr. adapted the play as a made-for-television musical fantasy in 1955, with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Anderson. High Tor was filmed in November 1955 by Desilu Productions at the RKO-Pathé Studio and broadcast March 10, 1956 on the CBS television network, as a 90-minute episode of the series Ford Star Jubilee. Bing Crosby, Julie Andrews, Nancy Olson, Hans Conreid, and Keenan Wynn starred in the film, produced by Arthur Schwartz, and directed by James Neilson.