Arts and Entertainment
documentaries, film festivals, movies, New York Film Festival, reviews, Robinson Devor, San Francisco, Sara Jane Moore, Suburban Fury
October 10, 2024
by Carla Hay
“Suburban Fury”
Directed byRobinson Devor
Culture Representation:The documentary film “Suburban Fury” has only one person interviewed: Sara Jane Moore, a deliberately mysterious person who has had many different identities.
Culture Clash:Before spending more than 30 years in prison for trying to shoot U.S. President Gerald Ford in 1975, Moore says she was an informant for the FBI.
Culture Audience:“Suburban Fury” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching “where are they now” documentaries about notorious people who have faded from the public eye.
“Suburban Fury” is a mixed bag of a documentary about Sara Jane Moore, who famously tried to assassinate Gerald Ford in 1975. Moore is the only person interviewed for this retro-inspired movie, which she seems to be using as a way to play mind games. Viewers will hear some interesting stories from her, which might or might not have credibility since there’s no one in the documentary who can verify her elaborate tales of being a FBI informant going undercover as a left-wing radical.
A caption mentions in the beginning of “Suburban Fury” that Moore agreed to be in the documentary by insisting that she would be the only person interviewed for the movie. “Suburban Fury” could have have used more independent research to help verify some of Moore’s unverified claims. However, “Suburban Fury” succeeds at being a “where are they now” curiosity spectacle that re-creates and shows some archival material from Moore’s past. Moore (who was born in 193O) is purposely vague about her personal life but discusses at length her alleged involvement with the FBI as a confidential informant during the 1970s.
Directed by Robinson Devor, “Suburban Fury” had its world premiere at the 2024 New York Film Festival. The movie was filmed in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Moore has been a longtime resident and where she committed her notorious act of trying to kill a U.S. president. On September 22, 1975, she used a .38 caliber gun to fire a single shot at then-U.S. President Ford while she standing in a crowd across the street from him when he was outside the St. Francis Hotel during a public visit to San Francisco. Moore was quickly arrested. She pleaded guilty to attempted murder and was sentenced to life in prison but was paroled in 2007.
Moore insisted then, as she does in this documentary, that she is perfectly sane. However, her unfocused ramblings don’t sound completely believable. Moore admits that she has spent much of her life being a pretender: When she was young, she was an aspiring actress. Later, she says she was very skilled at leading a life of many identities at once: She was a suburban housewife who also hung out and partied with people who were members of extreme left-wing factions of the Black Liberation movement.
Many of the interviews of Moore are conducted while she’s in the back seat of a 1970s station wagon parked on a San Francisco hill, while an unidentified man in a suit stands near the car, as if he’s on the lookout for someone, or waiting to see if Moore will try to leave. In the documentary’s end credits, a caption says that “Suburban Fury” was made with the cooperation of the U.S. Secret Service, but there is no further elaboration.
Moore gets very feisty and irritable with Devor, who can be heard but not seen asking her some questions. She yells at him if she doesn’t like the questions. She also gets very uptight and evasive about certain topics. For example, she defiantly says she won’t talk about her current family life because she wants to protect her family’s privacy.
The documentary has no information about what Moore did with her life after she was paroled from prison. The majority of what she talks about in the documentary is what she did in the 1970s, when she was supposedly an undercover informant for the FBI. She contradicts herself by saying she has no regrets about the presidential assassination attempt and but also saying in another interview that it was a mistake. There’s also some not-very-interesting commentary from her about what her life was like in prison.
“Suburban Fury” often uses boxy film aspect ratios of a 1970s-styled home movie, to give the look of a movie that could have been filmed in the era when Super 8 film cameras were consider hi-tech. “Suburban Fury” has the expected archival footage of the assassination attempt. Moore describes what happened immediately after she was apprehended by law enforcement. She says that male police officers began beating her out of anger at her attempted assassination. She says at one point during this assault, her trousers were pulled down, and one of the officers exclaimed in surprise that she was a woman.
The way Moore tells it, in the years before she went to prison, she was recruited by the FBI to infiltrate Black Liberation groups because the word on the street was that these groups would trust her. She says her main FBI contact was someone whom she calls Bertram “Bert” Worthington, which she says is not his real name. She tells elaborate stories about clandestine meetings with Worthington, whom she describes as a Yale University graduate who wore raggedy tweed suits and always treated her like a respectable lady.
These stories are the basis for the documentary’s narration of what Worthington might say about Moore now. “Surburban Fury” director Devor is the voice of Worthington in this narration. In “Suburban Fury,” Moore claims that Worthington knew about her plans to shoot Gerald Ford and advised her to escape with her son in her car and become a fugitive if she succeeded with her plan.
Moore will only discuss her doomed marriages to two of her ex-husbands, including the unnamed doctor whom she was married to when she was arrested for the assassination attempt. She says she was miserable in the marriage because he refused to let her have a job. “Surburban Fury” includes declassified FBI files that show by the time 45-year-old Moore was involved in this assassination attempt, she had already been married and divorced five times.
She also mentions how her previous husband—whom she does not name but she will only describe as someone who worked in the movie industry—wanted her to have an abortion when she had a surprise pregnancy. She refused to terminate the pregnancy. Moore speaks fondly of her son, whom she raised for a period of time with her doctor husband as her son’s stepfather. But the documentary also shows the FBI files that list she gave birth to about four children whom she abandoned. Moore is not fully confronted in the documentary about all the secrets and lies that she seems have accumulated in her life.
Moore will only admit that she came from an affluent background in West Virginia. The documentary has photos of Moore at various stages in her life when she had several surnames, to show without saying that she has long been a chameleon with different identities. Was she a bored housewife who somehow got caught up in espionage and political conspiracies? Or was she a calculating manipulator who knew exactly what she was doing?
“Suburban Fury” goes off on a tangent to discuss the 1974 kidnapping of heiress Patricia “Patty” Hearst, who was a 19-year-old student at the Unversity of California at Berkeley at the time of her abduction. Hearst joined her kidnappers in the left-wing Symbionese Liberation Army (which claimed to have an ideology of “rob from the rich to give to the poor”) on a crime spree that included bank robberies. Moore expresses disdain for SLA and Hearst, by saying that Hearst was kind of stupid and that SLA should have kidnapped Hearst’s wealthy father (Randolph Apperson Hearst) instead of going after one of his children.
What does SLA have to do with Moore? SLA was associated with Wilbert “Popeye” Jackson, who was involved with prison reform as a founder of United Prisoner Union while he was incarcerated at San Quentin Prison. Moore says she was one of many lovers that Jackson had at the time, like a harem. According to Moore, Jackson was sympathetic to the SLA but he also wanted to help Patty Hearst because he hoped that her father would reward Jackson by helping give a good education to Jackson’s son.
Moore also had an indirect connection to the Hearst family because she was a volunteer bookeeper for People in Need, a charity established by the Hearst family in response to SLA’s demands that in order for SLA to free Patty Hearst from SLA’s captivity, the Hearst family needed to do more for low-income people. There are some archival photos of Moore working for People in Need. Moore says she was very good at her People in Need job, However, since “Suburban Fury” viewers are only getting her selective version of events, it’s hard to know how truthful she is in certain parts of her story.
The many twists and detours that Moore takes in her storytelling get a little tiresome to watch when it becomes all too obvious that she wants to portray herself as a folk heroine who led a very unusual life. She portrays herself as a “victim” of “oppressive” government manipulations that involved death threats from government officials, even though she also describes herself in other parts of her stories as an independent woman who broke the law of her own free will. Without anyone else interviewed in the documentary, the narrative of “Suburban Fury” is obviously very one-sided.
Moore describes the day of her assassination attempt as, “I think I was in a fugue. A fugue state is a pattern.” She says she felt it was pre-destined that she would carry out the plan and remembers that there were no unexpected delays or hitches in the plan. “The plan had been written to be successful. I also thought I’d be killed,” she adds.
One of the many examples of Moore’s questionable credibility is that at one point in the interview, she claims she had no intention of killing Ford. In a separate interview, she says that at the time, she believed that political murders (including assassinating a U.S. president) were necessary for radical groups to get attention, and she had no qualms about killing a U.S. president if necessary. At some point during the documentary, viewers will wonder if Moore has told so many lies, she doesn’t know what the truth is anymore.
“Suburban Fury” doesn’t pass judgment on Moore but doesn’t go far enough in questioning her. She seems to get very irritated when she thinks she doesn’t have control of a situation. The main reason to watch this movie is out of curiosity to see what someone who has lived this type of duplicitous life has to say about herself when she’s in her 90s.
Moore seems to have a quick-thinking mind and looks healthier and younger than most people in her age group. One of the most telling things about her is in the documentary’s end credits. Moore, sitting silently in the back seat of a car at night, looks around nervously, as if she’s expecting the car to be ambushed at any moment. It’s a striking image that indicates that Moore might no longer be incarcerated in prison, but she a remains a prisoner of her own paranoia.