The picture was based on the short story Failure, written by Katharine Haviland-Taylor, and the screenplay was penned by Dalton Trumbo.

The story tells of a saintly small-town doctor working under difficult circumstances somewhere in the United States after World War I.

The lawyer opens Abbott's strongbox for the deceased man's impatient creditors, local banker George Sykes, newspaper editor Jode Harkness and store owner Homer Ramsey.

When he graduates and returns to Westport, he tells his father that he is going into partnership with Dr. Robinson because he is more interested in making money than in helping people.

When Abbott fears that an outbreak of infantile paralysis (polio) among the children is imminent, he tries to get an upcoming county fair canceled.

Returning to the present, Harkness, Sykes, and Ramsey finally acknowledge the goodness of the man who had been a thorn in their sides for so long.

[3] In April 2007, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) premiered six films produced by Merian C. Cooper at RKO which had been out of distribution for more than 50 years.

(A retired RKO executive stated in an interview used as a promo on TCM for the premiere that Cooper did allow the films to be shown in 1955–1956 in a limited re-release and only in New York City.)

According to TCM host Robert Osborne, Cooper agreed to a legal settlement in 1946, after accusing RKO of not giving him all the money due him from his producer's contract in the 1930s.

Times film critic Frank S. Nugent wrote, "Our admiration for A Man to Remember is so ungrudgingly complete...a picture of this one's competence so looms out of all proportion to its physical size.