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 where Attack on the Iron Coast (1968) introduces Andrew Keir as Captain Owen Franklin, commanding the vessel that carries a commando force to the German-held shore. The film, a fictionalized retelling of Operation Chariot, restages the real raid of 28 March 1942, when the British rammed an explosive-laden former American destroyer into the great dry dock at Saint-Nazaire to deny it to the battleship Tirpitz. Keir, the Scottish 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 leading the assault.

An Omega has long been attached to Franklin, and the brand is at least plausible on its own terms: Omega was the single largest supplier of wristwatches to the British Ministry of Defence in the Second World War and one of the Dirty Dozen makers of the W.W.W. military watch, exactly the kind of timepiece a 1942 RN officer might wear. Plausible is not proven. The one frame the film gives of the character has both hands wrapped around binoculars at chest height, cuffs out of shot, so the camera never gives up his wrist. Until one does, the Omega stays a reasonable guess rather than a fact.