Alain Delon wears a Baume & Mercier

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967) opens on Jef Costello lying on the bed of a sparse Paris room, smoke rising, a small caged bird his only company, beneath an epigraph from the book of bushido that Melville simply made up. Alain Delon plays the contract killer in trench coat and fedora who shoots a nightclub owner, is seen by witnesses including the house pianist Valerie, and still walks out of the police lineup, only to find his own employers have decided he is now the loose end. The film's fingerprints are all over later crime cinema: John Woo built The Killer in its image, and Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog restages its ending, a man facing his death with an unloaded gun.

The watch gets its own insert shot. Turned to the inside of Costello's right wrist on a black textured leather band sits a cushion-cased steel watch with a round white dial and black Roman numerals, and in the close-up the dial is legible down to the printing: the small Greek-letter logo over BAUME & MERCIER, GENEVE. Which Baume & Mercier it is has never been established, so the brand is as far as the identification goes.