Al Pacino wears an unidentified watch

Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon opens with Sonny Wortzik walking into a Brooklyn bank with a plan to rob it. The plan falls apart within minutes. Pacino plays Sonny as a man operating well past the limits of his competence: desperate, loud, improvising badly, and somehow still sympathetic. The real Sonny Wortzik, John Wojtowicz, robbed the bank to pay for his partner's gender reassignment surgery. Lumet shot the film to feel like a documentary that tips into absurdism.

BAMFstyle covered the prop in their wardrobe write-up and describes it as "a simple stainless steel dress watch on a smooth black leather strap, similar to many produced at the time by watchmakers of all price points from Timex to Omega," with a silver dial, straight-line hour markers, and no date window. They stopped short of identifying a specific maker. The watch grounds Sonny in a specific economic reality: it costs less than the ammunition in his gun and tells you everything about his bracket. The dress watch is the watch of a man robbing a bank because he literally cannot afford not to.