Set in the 1940s, the feature stars Patrick Dempsey, Beverly D'Angelo, Michael Constantine, Betty Jinnette, Kathleen Freeman, and Peter Hobbs.

She is sentenced to three years' probation, ordered to go to church regularly for "moral training", and repay the county for the cost of transporting them back from Colorado.

His father brings him back home, and soon thereafter Sonny finds himself before the same judge, who rules him incorrigible, and sends him to a youth correctional center until he is 21.

The public and the media are more fascinated than outraged by Sonny's romantic prowess, with the press nicknaming him the "Compton Casanova," the "Love Bandit" and the "L.A.

However, Kosberg and Simons were not able to purchase the screen rights from the two women who were romantically involved with Wisecarver, so their names were changed in the script.

[3] Seven years later in 1984, Los Angeles Magazine ran another “Whatever happened to Sonny Wisecarver” story and this time producers Karen Mack and Gary Adelson thought it would make a good movie.

Transcripts from the court proceedings were used verbatim and quotes from newspapers and magazine were copied directly from articles that were published at the time.

The Los Angeles Times wrote in their review that Robinson "brought a light, comic touch to Sonny's misadventures, which makes the puritanical punishments handed down to him, and especially to his women, seem all the more absurd".

[6] The New York Times said in their review that "if the events depicted in In the Mood were not in fact based on Sonny's true story, they wouldn't be credible for a second...it reserves its greatest warmth for the era in which the action takes place.

[7] Film critic Roger Ebert wrote "this kid named Patrick Dempsey is the perfect choice to play Sonny.

He's got the wisecracking spirit of one of Neil Simon's autobiographical heroes, but he also has a certain saintly simplicity, a way of not seeing all the things that could go wrong...the movie is comfortably set in its period, the mid-1940s of Roosevelt and rationing, Glenn Miller and Woody Herman, and a national hunger for headlines that were not about the war...the period is established without being allowed to overcome the picture, which finds a gentle offhand way to get its laughs; usually we're laughing, not at punch lines, but at human nature.