Al Pacino wears a Piaget 18K Gold Automatic

Over a pool table in Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way, Al Pacino leans in to line up a shot, and the cuff of his leather coat slides back to show a band of yellow gold on his left wrist. Pacino plays Carlito Brigante, a former heroin dealer newly out of prison on a legal technicality. The film is set in 1975 and was released in 1993, and across it Carlito is trying to go straight and save enough to get out for good and start over in the Bahamas. The gold watch is one piece of the jewelry the film hangs on him, worn on the left wrist while his rings and a bracelet sit on the right.

What the watch actually is has never been settled. On screen it reads as a thin gold dress watch on a gold bracelet, and the dial shows no legible logo in the dim bar light. The Piaget label attached to it comes from an aggregator listing and from a reported line in Edwin Torres's source novel, which is said to describe Carlito's watch as an 18-karat Piaget. Neither identifies the prop. Collectors who have gone frame by frame disagree among themselves, naming Piaget, Bulgari, Bulova, or a watch built for the production. No watch publication has pinned it down and no model or reference is legible, so the identification stops at a plausible gold Piaget and goes no further.