Alec Baldwin wears a Hamilton Khaki Field

Late in Pearl Harbor, after the harbor itself has burned, the story turns to the counterstrike. Alec Baldwin walks on as Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, the officer who in April 1942 led sixteen B-25 bombers off the deck of the USS Hornet and hit Tokyo, the first time the United States struck the Japanese home islands. The bombers were too big to land back on a carrier. The plan was to drop their loads and keep flying, toward airfields in China, on whatever fuel they had left. Baldwin enters late, with the raid.

On his fliers' wrists, and on his own, the filmmakers put Hamilton, and that was not set dressing. In 1941 the US military issued its servicemen Hamilton Khaki Field watches with mechanical movements. During the war Hamilton stopped making watches for civilians and turned out more than a million for the armed forces. So the period-correct watch and the product-placement watch were the same one. Hamilton names the placement itself: its Khaki Field Mechanical page lists the film and the men who wore it, Rafe McCawley, Danny Walker, and Doolittle, played by Affleck, Hartnett, and Baldwin. The tie-in was real enough that Hamilton sold a commemorative Khaki Field Pearl Harbor model alongside the movie, 38 millimeters of sandblasted steel for 195 dollars.

There is a catch. You can barely see it. The watch never gets a clean close-up on Doolittle, and the surviving stills, even the auctioned costume from his scenes, show the uniform and not the wrist. The identification does not come from freezing a frame. It comes from Hamilton, the company that armed the real men this film is about and still lists Doolittle among the people who wore its watch.