Andrew Keir wears an Omega

In the summer of 1942, on the bridge of a ship running the English Channel toward occupied France, a bearded Royal Navy captain raises his binoculars and watches the coast come up. That is the scene "Attack on the Iron Coast" (1968) gives us, and it is where we meet Andrew Keir as Captain Owen Franklin, the officer commanding the vessel that carries a commando force across to the German-held shore. The film, produced for the Mirisch Company, is a fictionalized retelling of Operation Chariot, the real raid of 28 March 1942 in which the British rammed an explosive-laden former American destroyer into the great dry dock at Saint-Nazaire to deny it to the German battleship Tirpitz. Keir, the Scottish character actor better known from Hammer's "Dracula: Prince of Darkness" and "Quatermass and the Pit," plays the steady naval professional opposite Lloyd Bridges as the American commander leading the assault.

A wristwatch has long been attributed to Franklin, and the attribution is specifically an Omega. The trouble is that the only basis for it is a single uncited entry on a film-watch catalogue, with no model named and no still offered, so it cannot be treated as documented. The brand is at least plausible on its own terms, because Omega was the largest single supplier of wristwatches to the British Ministry of Defence in the Second World War and one of the so-called Dirty Dozen makers of the W.W.W. military watch, which is exactly the kind of timepiece a 1942 RN officer might wear. Plausible is not proven. The one frame the film leaves us of the character has both his hands wrapped around a pair of binoculars at chest height, his cuffs out of shot, so the camera never gives up his wrist. Until a frame does, the watch stays a catalogue rumor and the identification stays a possibility.