Al Pacino wears a Tutima Flieger

Partway through Righteous Kill, the camera drops from Al Pacino's face to his wrist, and a black-dialed pilot's chronograph fills the frame. He's playing Detective David Fisk, the worn-down NYPD veteran everyone calls Rooster, and as he turns his hand I can read the dial: a coin-edge rotating bezel with a red marker at twelve, three recessed subdials, bold white Arabic numerals, cathedral lume hands, a brushed steel bracelet. The name across it is Tutima.

Tutima is a Glashütte name with a cockpit pedigree. In 1941 the company built the Fliegerchronograph for the Luftwaffe - the first German chronograph with a flyback function, on the hand-wound Caliber 59, with a coin-edged bezel, a single red reference marker, and a black dial meant to be read at a glance. The watch on Rooster's wrist carries that forward, knurled bezel and tall lume hands intact, now on a Valjoux 7750, the unglamorous Swiss automatic behind a whole generation of tool chronographs. Collectors and Tutima's own ad campaign pin it as the Flieger Chronograph F2; I can read the name on the dial but never the reference.

The film pairs Rooster with his longtime partner Turk, played by Robert De Niro, two homicide detectives chasing a vigilante who keeps executing the criminals the courts let walk. It was only the third film to put Pacino and De Niro in the same cast, after The Godfather Part II and Heat, and the first to spend most of its runtime with the two of them side by side.

Then the watch ended up in court. When Righteous Kill opened in 2008, Tutima ran a campaign tying the Flieger Chronograph F2 to the film and trading on its two Oscar-winning leads. Pacino and De Niro sued Overture Films and Tutima over advertising they said falsely implied an endorsement, the complaint noting that Pacino, across a long career, had never commercially endorsed any product in the United States. The case settled confidentially in December 2009. A German military chronograph, sitting plainly on the wrist of a New York cop, became the one thing its two stars went to court to disown.