Alain Delon wears an Enicar Sherpa Ultradive

In 2012, about a hundred of Alain Delon's watches went up for sale at Bonhams in Paris, and one piece never crossed the block. The Enicar Sherpa Ultradive he wore in Les Aventuriers was not in the catalogue, because he had already given it to his son Anthony.

Robert Enrico shot the film in 1966, working from a José Giovanni novel. Delon plays Manu, a gifted pilot who joins Lino Ventura's Roland, an inventive mechanic, in hunting a treasure sunk off the Congolese coast in a plane crash. The Ultradive on Manu's wrist had been in Enicar's catalogue for barely a year, and it was not the only one on set: the collectors at Enicar 101 count all three male leads, Delon, Ventura and Serge Reggiani, wearing Ultradives, Delon's an early example with the double lollipop seconds hand. The brand behind it was a family operation. Enicar is Racine spelled backwards, a reversal suggested by founder Ariste Racine's wife Emma in 1913 because the family name was already trademarked. The quartz crisis killed the original company in the 1980s.

Delon kept the watch long after the cameras stopped. He wore it on the set of La Piscine with Romy Schneider, and Anthony Delon says scenes from Les Aventuriers, watch included, ran in Dior's advertising for Eau Sauvage. Asked decades later whether the Ultradive mattered to him because it was his father's, Anthony answered with how it looks: "I love the vintage look... She is beautiful and iconic."