Here is the first sentence of my review of Becket in this week’s paper:

Becket looks like a Serious movie for Serious people—it’s black and white, from 1963, concerns the friendship (then foeship) between King Henry II and the Archbishop of Canterbury, stars the legendary artistes Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole, is based on a play by a Frenchman, uses English history (Normans v. Saxons, crown v. clergy) as its backdrop, and has the audacity to be a movie about medieval power struggles without a single battle scene.

Here is the first sentence of an email by Chris Principio, a marketing manager for Landmark theaters, sent yesterday at 6:02:57 pm:

Hey there, just wanted to follow up with you… BECKET is actually “In Color”…

Here is the entirety of an email by film editor Annie Wagner, sent at 6:03:24 pm:

Brendan! I’m mad at you.
Annie

How could I not notice that Becket was “In Color”? According to the internets, temporary color blindness can be caused by Viagra (nope), electric shock (nope), and brain damage (don’t think so). There’s really no excuse—I just remember the movie in shades of grey and, actually, I prefer it that way. (Confidential to Paul Simon: Au contraire, old man. Everything looks better in black and white.)

But I’m sorry for my monochromatic memory and, in the spirit of reconciliation, offer you this anecdote, about a rare kind of color blindness in which everything appears black and white:

While normally rare, achromatopsia is very common on the island of Pingelap, a part of the Pohnpei state, Federated States of Micronesia, where it is called maskun: about 1/12 of the population there has it. The island was devastated by a storm in the 18th century, and one of the few male survivors carried a gene for achromatopsia; the population is now several thousand, of whom about 30% carry this gene.