Sweater Girl, 1942

You might not think that Sweater Girl sounds like a Halloween trick-or-treat post, but it is.

This 1942 Paramount Picture, starring Eddie Bracken, June Preisser and Betty Jane Rhodes, isn't all campus kitsch. Sure it starts all Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland with college kids trying to put on a show, but somewhere over this rainbow it twists into a murder mystery. Ah, make that a musical murder mystery.

At the time of its release, The New York Times didn't like it:

Its cast—all of very tender years and much too immature for shocks of this sort—starts off by preparing that inevitable musical show but become involved in murders, babbling idiots and homicidal insanity in a plot which is nearly as confused as a Times Square traffic jam at curtain time.

However, the song "I Don't Want To Walk Without You" (words by Frank Loesser, music by Jule Styne) went on to become a pop hit -- thanks due to a young and rising star by the name of Frank Sinatra.

According to Wiley Lee Umphlett in Movies Go to College: Hollywood and the World of the College-Life Film some appreciated the film:

"This film's mixture of comedy, mystery and music was handled so skillfully that one reviewer was moved to comment that Sweater Girl was exceptional in its avoidance of the "usual artificiality of college pictures' and therefore contained the "spark of reality."

(Quote via Google Books.)

And the film still has fans who hope for a DVD release.