Besides his infamous pardon of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford’s tenure as president of the United States is marked mainly by a procession of mildly interesting trivia factoids. For instance, how many people recall that there were two attempts made on his life in September 1975, both by women — the only female would-be presidential assassins in US history to date? A few weeks after former Manson Family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme had a go at him, Sara Jane Moore fired twice at Ford as he worked a Union Square crowd in San Francisco. She missed, and served 32 years of a life sentence before being released in 2007. The documentary Suburban Fury (2024), which recently premiered at the New York Film Festival, sits with Moore to learn how the politics and culture of the time drove her toward Ford with a gun in her hand.
Moore, now 94 but still sharp, is the only interviewee. The film facilitates her retracing the steps of her life in the 1970s, with a stream of archival footage serving as stand-ins for her memories. She speaks to director Robinson Devor at different San Francisco locations relevant to her story — mainly from the backseat of a car, but also in the same ballroom where she was interrogated after she attacked Ford. Half a century later, she willingly faces interrogation again, though in a different context.
Writer Geri Spieler ably sums up how the culture reacted to Moore in her 2009 biography Taking Aim at the President: “I found the idea that this snub-nosed, apple-cheeked, middle-class mom had fired a weapon at the president was almost impossible to believe.” Then and now, we don’t tend to think of an archetypical sitcom nosy neighbor à la Gladys Kravitz when we imagine an assassin. Twists emerged with further investigation into Moore: the 45-year-old five-time divorcée and mother of four was fixated on the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, had been informing on various left-wing organizations for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and was ultimately politically radicalized by this work, which she’s claimed was the impetus for the assassination attempt.
Moore’s agency handler, whom she knew as “Bert Worthington,” is present in the documentary via a series of voiceovers that were written based on her recollections of him. Devor reads these snippets, further blurring the line between past and present as he acts both as her controller then and her confessor now.
Yet the more Devor tries to close in on concrete reasons for Moore’s actions, or what precisely she hoped to accomplish through killing Ford, the slipperier she becomes. It’s possible she can no longer explain it, if she ever could. She describes herself as being in a “fugue state” in Union Square, and speaks as if she had no agency in the moment: “The plan had been written, and I was following it … You’ve learned your lines and you’re onstage, and you’re going to do it without thinking.”
Suburban Fury suggests that the tension of political upheaval ratcheted up around Moore throughout the ‘70s until there seemed to be no other outlet than an extreme action. Moore might not be able to satisfyingly articulate why she tried to kill Ford in this film, but she may have explained it most succinctly back in 1975: “It was kind of an ultimate protest against the system. There comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun.”
Suburban Fury (2024), directed by Robinson Devor, screens at various theaters at Lincoln Center on October 10 and 13.
