Alan Rickman wears a Cartier Tank

Hans Gruber and his crew take Nakatomi Plaza on Christmas Eve, calling themselves terrorists, after 640 million dollars in bearer bonds in the vault. Gruber is not a terrorist, though, and the earliest sign is on his wrist. Under the cuff of his charcoal double-breasted suit is a gold Cartier Tank on a black leather strap, the watch of a man with taste and a passport, not a cause.

That suit, and the watch under it, almost did not happen. Die Hard was Alan Rickman's first film, and the production wanted Gruber in terrorist fatigues like everyone else. Rickman, a stage actor with no movie career to protect, left producer Joel Silver a note arguing his villain should wear a suit and, at one point, pass himself off as a frightened hostage. Silver agreed, which is how the film got both its most elegant villain and the scene where Gruber, cornered by McClane, slips into a panicked American accent and pretends to be a hostage named Bill Clay. A suit needs a watch to slip under the cuff, and the Tank was it.

He nearly wore a TAG Heuer instead. Screenwriter Steven E. de Souza has said the gang was originally meant to wear matching ones, with a cut scene in which Gruber tells his men to synchronize their watches and the camera circles a ring of identical TAG Heuers, planted so McClane could later pick them out. The scene was cut, and Gruber kept the Cartier. It fits the man the rest of the film keeps showing you, the one who pauses to admire Takagi's tailoring before he has him killed and can place it as a John Phillips of London because he owns two himself. The gold Tank is part of the same costume, the part you only catch if you are watching wrists.