Art Garfunkel wears a Waltham

The Rank Organisation, which financed the film, called it "a sick film made by sick people for sick people" and refused to distribute it. Nicolas Roeg directed Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell, and Harvey Keitel in this non-linear psychological thriller set in Vienna, where Garfunkel plays Alex Linden, a psychiatrist whose obsessive affair with Milena (Russell) is pieced together by Inspector Netusil (Keitel) after she's hospitalized from an overdose. The film intercuts between the investigation and the relationship, and the result is deeply uncomfortable by design. Roeg had directed Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth before this. He knew what he was doing.

Garfunkel wears a Waltham, an American brand that was once among the most important watchmakers in the world. The Waltham Watch Company was founded in Massachusetts in 1850 and pioneered machine-made watch production in the United States, but it didn't survive past 1957. By 1980, a Waltham on screen is already a relic. On a character like Linden — an American academic in Vienna, older, controlling, clinging to something — the dead brand carries weight that a living one wouldn't.