Al Pacino wears an Omega Constellation

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II runs two clocks at once. In one, Robert De Niro plays the young Vito Corleone building a name in the New York of the 1910s and 1920s. In the other, set in the late 1950s, Al Pacino's Michael Corleone runs the family from a walled compound on Lake Tahoe. Michael's half of the film is a study in subtraction: he testifies before a Senate committee, orders the killing of his own brother Fredo, and watches his marriage to Kay come apart. The last we see of him he sits alone in his garden, and Pacino plays it without moving a muscle.

On his left wrist through the Tahoe and Senate stretch is a gold dress watch on a bracelet, an Omega Constellation, the faceted "pie-pan" piece Omega launched in 1952 as its prestige line and aimed squarely at the Rolex Datejust. The pie-pan name comes from the dial, its outer ring gently sloped like an upturned tin. It is a quiet, expensive watch for a man dressing the part of a legitimate businessman. And it is not the watch Michael started with. In the first Godfather he wears a steel Rolex Datejust; by Part II he has moved to gold Omega. In a saga obsessed with what a man inherits against what he takes for himself, that small upgrade reads like one of the few choices Michael makes purely for his own pleasure. He inherited the business, the violence, and the loneliness. The watch he picked out.