'Ahead of Time' highlights a remarkable life

By any measure, Ruth Gruber is a most remarkable woman.

She wanted to get a closer look at Adolf Hitler, so she pretended to be a German citizen so she could sit in the area closest to Der Fuhrer.

At 15, she was accepted at New York University. At 20, she became the youngest student to receive a doctorate.

In 1944, she escorted 1,000 Holocaust refugees from Naples to New York during a secret war mission.

Above everything else, Ruth Gruber was a journalist working mostly for the New York Herald Tribune. It was a career she carefully chose, even though her skeptical father said at the time, “What kind of career is that for a nice, Jewish girl?”

Bob Richman, who photographed the docs “An Inconvenient Truth” and “My Architect,” makes Gruber's fascinating life story his directorial debut in “Ahead of Time.”

It's a straightforward, traditional doc with talking heads, archival footage and interviews with Gruber's friends and relatives. But what a subject he has to work with.

Gruber, 94, whisks us through her remarkable life, one as independent as Katharine Hepburn's and as adventurous as Amelia Earhart's.

“I thought the whole world was Jewish,” Gruber says of her early childhood in Brooklyn. She credits a crush on her German teacher as the fuse that launched her explosive life. Her mastery of German led her to cover Germany during Hitler's rise to power. Her mother was convinced Hitler would see her in a crowd and shoot her.

These are just a few of the humanizing and often humorous nuggets to be mined from Richman's doc, a moving portrait of a journalist and a pioneer for women in the American workplace.

<p><b>“Ahead of Time”</b></p>

<p>Rating: ★ ★★</p>

<p>Where: Renaissance Place in Highland Park</p>

<p>Not rated; suitable for general audiences</p>

<p>Running time: 73 minutes</p>