Alec Baldwin wears an unidentified watch

By the last act of Miami Blues, Frederick Frenger Jr. has walked into a Miami pawnshop in a rose-pink blazer, and it is going badly. Blood is spreading across his yellow shirt. A snub-nose revolver is in his hand. On the other wrist, half-swallowed by the jacket cuff, sits a watch, and you can almost make it out.

Almost. That is the trouble with Junior's watch. In the clearest frame of the robbery it reads as a bit of gold and a dark strap and not one detail more, no dial, no maker. The costume site BAMF Style maps this outfit down to the crossed-golf-club crest on the blazer buttons and the green-lensed Ray-Ban Wayfarers, and even it cannot close the case. Its writer notes that Junior cycles through several wristwatches over the film, takes this one for a gold tank-shaped watch on a dark leather strap, and sets it apart from the all-gold watch Junior wears in other scenes. The reading comes hedged. He thinks it is a tank watch, and says the film rarely gives a clear look. No watch magazine, brand archive, or auction record has named it since.

What the film does show is who is wearing it. Junior steps off a plane and, within minutes, breaks a Hare Krishna's index finger in the terminal, killing him. He beats a police sergeant, Hoke Moseley, and leaves with the badge, the gun, and the dentures, then spends the rest of the picture impersonating a cop. Baldwin plays him with a bright, blank ease, a man who cannot see why anyone minds. The pink blazer is what he has on at the end, when the pawnbroker takes several of his fingers and Moseley tracks him to the house and shoots him. The gold-toned watch on its dark strap, the one on his wrist in those last scenes, has never been identified.