Anthony Hopkins wears a Corum Double Eagle Coin Watch

The Corum Coin Watch became known as the Presidential watch, the gold disc that turns a U.S. Double Eagle into a timepiece, and Oliver Stone reaches for it in Nixon (1995) as shorthand for the office itself. Anthony Hopkins wears one as Richard Nixon, the coin face catching light at his wrist through the rise and the ruin.

The choice carries an irony Stone surely intended. On August 15, 1971, Nixon ended the dollar's convertibility to gold and brought down the Bretton Woods system, which makes a gold coin on his wrist a relic of the monetary order he dismantled. The real Corum uses an actual twenty-dollar gold piece for its dial. The watch in the film does not: the screen-used prop, sold by both Prop Store and Heritage Auctions, was built by the production to replicate the Corum, with a faux-gold face engraved "United States of America Twenty" over an eagle on a black leather strap, and it spent years on display at Planet Hollywood before reaching auction.

The history is looser than the prop suggests. The coin watch is tied to several presidents, but the real Nixon's documented watch was a humble Vulcain Cricket alarm, not a Corum. The film dresses him in the grander symbol, which is the point: Stone's Nixon collects the artifacts of power without ever seeming to enjoy them.