In its script (and resulting structure), A Man To Remember started out as a more ambitious remake of One Man's Journey (1933), and one that probably wasn't expected to attract as much attention as it did. The lead is played by Edward Ellis, a fine actor but hardly the box-office-draw that Lionel Barrymore, who starred in the original, represented. Nor was there anyone else in the cast, apart from Anne Shirley, to make audiences believe that this was anything more than a routine RKO programmer. Audiences were pleasantly surprised -- though amazed might be a more appropriate word -- as were most critics, when they saw the fine directorial hand displayed by first-time film director Garson Kanin, who made this into a mature, finely-nuanced drama that seemed a lot more substantial than its B-movie status or 79 minutes would have led one to expect. The movie ended up being cited as one of the best releases RKO had in all of 1938 -- and even more amazingly, A Man To Remember was also "lost" for 50 years or more and, to some extent, has not been entirely "found" even today. A Man To Remember, like One Man's Journey and a handful of other RKO titles of the mid-1930's that were produced by Merian C. Cooper -- Double Harness, Stingaree, and Rafter Romance were three of the others -- ended up being owned by Cooper and became separated from the RKO library, and ended up unseen for more than 50 years. Some suspect, in the case of A Man To Remember, that it was the presence of Dalton Trumbo -- whose left-of-center politics later got him blacklisted -- as screenwriter, that offended the notoriously right-wing Cooper and possessed him to suppress the picture. In any case, the only extant version of A Man To Remember, as of 2007, was a print with Danish subtitles. And it was re-released (in that form) by Turner Classic Movies, along with the other five movies in this package of "lost" movies, in 2007. That included their first theatrical showings in more than 50 years (at New York's Film Forum, in a one week run) and showings of the TCM cable channel.
