Positive Thinking Preserved

One Man's Way. "If the Lord ever calls me, I'm not going," pipes the twelve-year-old son of an Ohio minister. He hates being a preacher's son because the other kids poke fun at him. But the boy is Norman Vincent Peale, who grows up to become a churchman and bestselling author (The Power of Positive Thinking) so famous that he gets the honor of seeing his biography filmed during his lifetime.

Actor Don Murray, in a fervently tight-jawed and idealized impersonation, begins Dr. Peale's career as a crime reporter in Detroit. He sees the efficacy of prayer when he saves a child trapped on a precarious ledge by telling her, "God is up there with you. He won't let you fall." After that experience, the reporter enters theology school, but grows impatient with the academic routine. "I didn't come here to be a scholar," he says. Assigned to a large parish in Syracuse, where he calls himself "a man with something to sell," Peale clashes with board members about an advertising campaign ("Lost your gal? In a lurch? Don't panic, pal. Go to church."). Ere long, thanks to "God's most potent chemistry," he meets and marries a spirited co-ed named Ruth (Diana Hyland). He is then summoned to Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, where he wins a huge following and prepares his first book, inspired by the simple dictum that "together, you and God can do anything." In the controversy arising from Positive Thinking, Peale begins to doubt, but dramatically resolves his doubts when he is called to the bedside of another stricken child.

Tucked into a script already long on inspirational appeal are four of Dr. Peale's own sermons, but this verity is not matched by any attempt to add real insight as the facts of his life unfold in patently fictional form. As drama, One Man's Way will appeal to few; as inspiration, mainly to those who believe in positive thinking.

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