The author of the bestselling The Power of Positive Thinking is the subject of this Hollywood biopic, which stars Don Murray as Norman Vincent Peale, a Detroit crime reporter turned Protestant preacher whose canny co-option of mass media gave him a celebrity status on par with Aimee Semple McPherson and the Reverend Billy Graham. A conscientious objector during the Korean War, Don Murray parlayed his Academy Award nomination for Bus Stop (1956) into an opportunity to produce and star in The Hoodlum Priest (1960), which chronicled the founding of Dismas House, the nation's first halfway house for rehabilitated prison parolees. Directed by Denis Sanders, whose War Hunt (1962) had provided Robert Redford with an early featured role, One Man's Way benefits from Murray's charismatic central performance but also from the winning support of William Windham (as Peale's clergyman father), Folgers coffee pitchlady Virginia Christina (as Peale's mother), Broadway transplant Diana Hyland (as the sorority girl who becomes Peale's supportive wife) and, in bits, The Dick Van Dyke Show's Ann Morgan Guilbert, a pre-Munsters' Butch Patrick, and Alien (1979) costars Tom Skerritt and Veronica Cartwright. Peale's problematic real life anti-Catholic beliefs (he was a vocal opponent of the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy) are sidestepped here in favor of his central message of positive thinking and the initial backlash that made the "minster to millions" a cause celébrè.

By Richard Harland Smith