It was six years ago. Six years. Do you remember? Do you remember the lockdown summer of 2020?

Things may have been easing up by then where you were, but here in California the ball was just getting rolling. Ah, the joys of living on the Golden State’s cutting edge! Half your income goes for bandages and blood transfusions. (I’ll spare you the story of my fourth-grade year in an “open,” chart-your-own-course California classroom, where I didn’t learn any math but did listen to a lot of Cheech and Chong records.)

Rough as COVID was, though, we got through it, one way or another. Never were our books, our music, our television shows and movies more important to us. They became more than mere diversions; often they were literally lifelines anchoring us to a sanity that we felt we were floating farther away from each day. (Sometimes I was amazed that the whole social and economic life of the United States was put on hold just so I could get caught up on The Mandalorian.)

All of this came back to me just last week, when I got the email that I wait for every June or July, the one announcing the annual Criterion 50 percent off sale at Barnes and Noble. Criterion, as I’m sure you know and if you don’t, you should, is “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions of the highest technical quality, with supplemental features that enhance the appreciation of the art of film.” For movies, Criterions are the gold standard of physical media.

They don’t have to convince me, though — I have almost six hundred Criterions, from a last few DVD’s that they’ve never upgraded to other formats, like Laurence Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet (United Kingdom 1948, Spine #82), to 4K UHD editions of recent films like Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (United States, Mexico 2021, Spine #1286) to multidisc Blu Ray collector’s sets like the massive, thirty-nine film Ingemar Bergman’s Cinema. (Some collector’s sets like Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema and Essential Fellini don’t have spine numbers, but some like Lone Wolf and Cub (Japan 1972-1974, Spine #841) and Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films 1954-1975 (Japan 1954-1975, Spine #1000) do. Thought you had me, didn’t you?)

As many Criterions as I have, The Awful Truth (United States 1937, Spine #917) is, I’m never satisfied; I always want more. I can’t help myself, Your Honor — I’m a hopeless addict, a Criterion junkie, and it was the same six years ago; when the email arrived on the morning of July 9^th, 2020, I was not missing the sale, pandemic or no pandemic.

My wife knows the drill — as soon as I get the notification, I give a loud yelp, jump up from the computer, grab my wallet and head for the door. (I do usually remember to get dressed first.) The only difference in 2020 was making sure that I had a mask before leaving the house.

It’s fifteen miles to the Barnes and Noble; I arrived at the store ten minutes after pulling out of my driveway, observing the speed limit all the way. (Both statements are true, I swear it — I must have passed through a wormhole somewhere on the freeway.)

When I walked into the store, it was virtually empty. You remember the eerie, almost postapocalyptic, last-man-on-earth emptiness of streets and shops and all public places then? How even in a grocery store, you almost expected to hear the wind moaning and see sheets of crumpled newspaper and other trash blowing down the aisles? The Barnes and Noble was like that; it’s a very large building, and I doubt that there were four people in it.

I walked to the back, where the movies and music are. The Criterions take up about twenty-five feet of the back wall, and as I stepped up to begin my browsing, there was only one other person there, at the other end, a young man probably thirty years my junior. While I had started at the left-hand side with Amarcord (Italy 1973, Spine #4), he had started on the right with Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman (Japan 1962-1973, Spine #679). Standing there in our masks, we were like two stick-up men from different gangs showing up to knock over the same bank.

Starting at opposite ends of the display, we of course wound up meeting in the middle. Ordinarily, I’m not someone who strikes up conversations with strangers; there are folks who can spend ten minutes next to someone in a dentist’s waiting room and go away knowing as much about them as their best friend, but I’m not one of those people. In normal times, therefore, I probably would have just passed this kid without a word.

2020 wasn’t a normal year, though, was it? And so, as we met in the middle, a conversation spontaneously started.

Strangers though we were, we did know something about each other, the same thing that you always know about anyone you see at a Criterion sale — we could be sure that we each knew and loved great movies, and that was enough.

In the space of just a minute or two, we were talking away as if we had known each other for years, and of course, the talk was about movies — genres, studios, directors, actors, scenes, great individual shots or moments… we covered them all. Someone observing from a distance would have probably thought that we were a little crazy, or that we each had just escaped from being locked away for months in a dark closet somewhere and were desperate for human contact. They wouldn’t have been far wrong.

We stood there, each clutching our Criterions (you can tell how much money addicts show up with by the height of their stacks). Our conversation finally wound down — we had probably talked for about forty minutes — and I prepared to head to the cashier, but before I could go, my new friend asked me a question. He had enough money for one more Criterion; if I could choose it for him, what would it be? I can’t tell you how touched I was.

I instantly thought of one of my all-time favorite films, a glass of acid flung in the face of the American public (and even more recklessly, the American media, which probably accounts for the terrible reviews it recieved), Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (United States 1951, Spine #396).

Kirk Douglas (in his greatest performance) is Chuck Tatum, a down-on-his-luck newspaperman doing penance in Albuquerque as he looks to push his way back into the Big Apple big time by finding a major story. Tatum finds a small story, but he manipulates it to make it big, bigger, the biggest in the country, and because of his selfishness and cynical string-pulling, an innocent man dies. (A souvenir hunter has gotten trapped in a cave; he could be extricated in a day but to stretch the story out and heighten the drama, Tatum convinces the authorities to use a method that will take a week or more, and the luckless Leo Minosa dies of pneumonia.) The self-loathing that Douglas displays by the end of the movie is positively radioactive.

It’s a brilliant, absolutely scalding film (God only knows how Wilder convinced the studio to make it) and one of the finest cinematic achievements of the 50’s… and before my hand was halfway to it, I knew that great as it is, Ace in the Hole was not the movie for that particular moment. The pleasure that I had experienced talking to my young friend told me that.

Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion (United States 1979, Spine #765), based on Walter Farley’s classic children’s novel, is the story of a boy, Alec, who is shipwrecked on a desert island with a wild black stallion. Alec struggles to survive on the barren island and also to tame the savage horse. He succeeds in both tasks (not without being painfully thrown off the stallion’s back several times), and he and the animal are eventually rescued and taken back home to America, where Alec is befriended by a jockey (an Oscar-nominated Mickey Rooney). The film concludes with Alec and the stallion beating the nation’s top two horses in a match race.

At the end of the film, as Alec and the black stallion surge ahead to win the race, the scene flashes back to Alec’s triumphant moment on the island months before, when the horse finally permitted the boy to ride him. Again we see the pair racing along the beach together, no longer separate from each other but virtually one creature, Alec’s hair flying wildly, his face glowing and his arms lifted ecstatically.

It is one of the most beautiful and moving images of joy and freedom in all movies, and even now I’m tearing up as I sit here thinking of it.

Joy, freedom, release — that’s what my friend needed most at that moment, what I needed, what we all needed. Thank God we had some wonderful songs, some wonderful stories, and some wonderful movies to hold us up until that release came, to keep us from reaching The Breaking Point (United States 1950, Spine #889), to assure us that nothing lasts forever and that one day we would be able to look back on that hard time and shake our heads as we asked ourselves, “Has it been that long ago, already?”

Six years.

The young man accepted my suggestion and left with The Black Stallion. I look for him every year when I return for the current sale (we never even asked each other our names), but I’ve never seen him, and it was the same this year. (I wasn’t completely disappointed — I did come home with eleven new Criterions.)

If 2020 was to be our single Brief Encounter (United Kingdom 1945, Spine #76) and our paths never cross again, I hope that he loved The Black Stallion as much as I do; I hope it gave him something that he needed, something he could hold onto until things got better. If nothing else, I hope that today it reminds him of a moment of human connection during a time when such moments were especially precious because they were so much harder to come by.

My movies (only a fraction of which are even Criterions) take up a lot of room. They make a definite impact on my shelf and closet space, and they sure as hell make an impact on my wallet. But I remain committed to physical media, and not just because I get cheesed when movies disappear from streaming services right before I’m ready to watch them. There are other reasons to own and not just stream — human reasons, as I always remember every year at this time.

Oh, and if you need a recommendation for a good movie to watch tonight, I can give you one. In fact, I already have.

---

Thomas Parker is a native Southern Californian and a lifelong science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fan. When not corrupting the next generation as a fourth grade teacher, he collects Roger Corman movies, Silver Age comic books, Ace doubles, and despairing looks from his wife. His last article for us was The Real Superheroes of the Comics