Sam Newfield is, in all probability, the most prolific director in American soundfilm history, but very little archival material survives on his career. The director of more than 250 feature films, as well as numerous shorts and television series’ episodes, in a career that spanned four decades (from 1923 to 1958) Newfield leaves behind him only his work on the set; next to nothing is known of his personal life. However, using conversations with Sigmund Neufeld, Jr. and Stanley Neufeld – the sons of Sam Newfield's (born Neufeld) brother Sigmund Neufeld (all quotes from them in this essay are from these interviews) – as well as materials from the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, I was able to piece together a rough sketch of the man behind such a torrential output of work.

Comedies, musicals, Westerns, horror films, jungle pictures, crime dramas, espionage thrillers – Sam Newfield did them all, often on budgets of fewer than $20,000 per feature and shooting schedules of as little as three days. But, as Martin Scorsese notes, watching Newfield's work is hard because he often seems absolutely detached from the images that appear on the screen, as if he is an observer rather than a participant. Then, too, the conditions of extreme economy that Newfield labored under created a pressure-cooker environment in which the ultimate goal of all his films was simply to get them done on time and under budget. Nevertheless, as arguably the most prolific auteur in American motion picture history, Newfield deserves mention and brief examination as one of the key “second rung” directors of 1940s Hollywood, Newfield's most productive era.

Born on 6 December 1899 in a cold water flat in the Bronx to immigrant parents from Budapest, Sam Neufeld was one of four children. His older brother, Sigmund Neufeld, Sr., was born in 1896 and, with the premature death of his father, Simon Neufeld, Sigmund rapidly became the family's sole source of income. Sam and Sigmund's other brother, Murray, became an electrician, while their sister, Sadie, eventually married a “grip” in the 1920s and settled down to life as a housewife and mother.