Sam Newfield

Biography

Legendary "B" picture director Sam Newfield was born Samuel Neufeld in New York City. His brother was Sigmund Neufeld, later the head of PRC Pictures, where Sam made so many of his films (so many, in fact, that he had to use the pseudonyms "Peter Stewart" and "Sherman Scott" so audiences wouldn't notice that only one man directed so much of the studio's output). He entered the film business in 1919 and began his career as a director in 1926, shooting two-reel comedy shorts for virtually every production company in town, from fly-by-night independent producers to major studios like Universal Pictures. He made his first full-length feature in 1933, for independent "B"-picture production company Tower Pictures. He worked for many of the independent studios, making films for such prestigious-sounding but low-rent companies as Ambassador Pictures, Victory Pictures and Puritan Pictures. While much of his output seemed to be, shall we say, "rushed", he did in fact manage to turn out several interesting, compact and well-made little westerns with Tim McCoy for Victory and Puritan (two companies headed by another "B" picture icon, producer Sam Katzman). In 1939 he went to work for PRC, where he would make his "name". Sam shot films in two styles: fast and faster. With rock-bottom budgets (at PRC, for instance, budgets were so low that he got paid only $500 a picture; he had to grind them out like sausages in order to make any kind of money), super-tight shooting schedules (often a week, sometimes less) and not necessarily the best talent in front of and behind the cameras, glitches were bound to happen. However, since Sam didn't believe in retakes (and couldn't afford them, anyway), whatever went wrong in the picture (crew members wandering into shots, actors flubbing lines, props malfunctioning, etc.) pretty much stayed in the picture. Sam made films in just about every conceivable genre (science-fiction, westerns, crime thrillers, horror, comedy), and while most were routine at best (and embarrassingly inept and/or incoherent at worst), there were a few bright spots among the dross: Lost Continent (1951), a sci-fi epic he made for low-budget specialist Lippert Pictures in 1951, showed more care than you normally found in a Newfield film, with a better cast and a more coherent script than he was usually given, and is now considered to be one of his best films, if not his best. He also turned out Western Pacific Agent (1950) for Lippert, a fast-paced, neat little crime thriller about railroad detectives investigating a string of murders. Newfield is considered to be among the most prolific directors in the history of American films (not counting cartoon directors, whose product rarely ran longer than 8-10 minutes or so), with an output estimated at approximately 300 films--everything from one-reel black-and-white training films to full-length color features--over a 30-year-plus career. He spent the last few years of that career shooting films and TV series outside the US (he shot the Buster Crabbe action series Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion (1955) in Morocco and the Lon Chaney Jr. western series Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans (1957) in Canada) because of cheaper production costs. Sam Newfield finally retired from the film industry in 1958 and died in Los Angeles in 1964.