There could be no better time to re-discover Peter Kass’ lost black-and-white masterpiece, TIME OF THE HEATHEN. Taking as its theme man’s inhumanity to man (and woman), Kass uses the microcosm of racism as well as the macrocosm of society blindly following rules, legal and cultural, to give us a searing indictment of humanity as well as a glimmer of transcendent hope. Make no mistake, this is not sugar-coated wish-fulfilment. It is a spare morality tale as full of righteous reckoning as the Old Testament from which it gets its title.
Set four years after the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it begins with the aptly named Gaunt (John Heffernan) wandering the freezing back roads of America. Overhead, military aircraft fly in tight formation, below, this scarecrow of a man attracts the attention of the local sheriff who questions the stranger about his identity and plans with a smile that is designed to intimidate. It’s only the bible Gaunt carries that prevents more trouble, particularly when he can finish the verse that the sheriff reads: Ezekial 30, about the decimation of kingdoms and the eponymous time of the heathen. Sent on his way, trouble finds him again when he comes upon the rape and murder of Marie (Ethel Eyler), a domestic, by her employer’s son, Ted (Stewart Heller). With only Gaunt and the woman’s young son, Jessie (Barry Collins) as witness to what happened, Ted’s father, Link (Orville Steward) devises a plan to frame, and murder, Gaunt, then kill the boy as collateral damage.
The flight from the father, son, and law enforcement takes on a mythic quality with a few well-realized metaphors, such as clouds over the sun, or Gaunt making a confession to himself as well as Jesse while sheltering in the ruins of a home in the twisting woods that has given them refuge. Kass, though, keeps us firmly entrenched in the harsh reality of racism at its most virulent. It would have been easy to confine that to Link, a soulless man incapable of any empathy who, in his indifference to suffering of any kind, has twisted his son into an impulsively violent young man whose remorse is just as violent. Instead, it extends beyond one generation poisoning another. The way the local police sneer at the idea of integration with brutal laughter. The way Jessie smiles at a white toddler smiling back at him only to have the girl’s older sister, younger than Jesse, stare him down with unmistakable hostility that is all the more insidious for being so natural in the girl. And with the same flat affect Link uses when laying out his plans to frame Gaunt or orders his obviously tortured son to shoot him.
The chase through the forest is tense, with the trees casting long shadows, and the boy persistently following a reluctant Gaunt. The former eloquent in his silence as an innocent traumatized, and the latter a tormented soul wandering nowhere to escape from his own trauma. Heffernen gives a performance of quiet power, his eyes seeking solace and resigned to finding none, his every movement reflecting his inner struggles with a deceptive calm. When he finally takes Jesses tiny hand in his, opening himself up, it is an overwhelming moment of ragged poignance.
Kerr uses the camera to deadly accurate effect, never showy, never slick, but finding the right shot, and the right angle to amplify the action while also commenting upon it. He and visual artist Ed Emshwiller mix noir-esque shadows with strong sunlight, and if the score occasionally becomes more bombastic than necessary, Kerr also knows exactly when to let silence fall, letting only the rustle of dead leaves or the sound of the winds fill our senses. When the film bursts into color during a sequence that is experimental, but vital to the storytelling, it is like an explosion as it creates a montage of brutality stemming from the bomb on Hiroshima, and other choice, shameful, moments in history.
TIME OF THE HEATHEN, as all great social commentary films do, holds a mirror up to society, and the audience more than 60 years after its initial release will find all too much that is familiar. They will also be galvanized. There can be no better legacy for Peter Kass than that he has made a film that is timeless.
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