Ben Stiller wears an unidentified watch

On Walter Mitty's left wrist, under a short-sleeved white shirt and a dark tie, sits a steel watch with a dark dial on a plain leather strap. Ben Stiller directs himself as Mitty, who manages the photographic negatives in the basement of the Life magazine offices and slips, mid-sentence, into daydreams where he is braver than the job allows. The story turns on one missing frame. The photographer Sean O'Connell, played by Sean Penn, marked negative 25 as the cover of Life's final print issue and then disappeared, and the negative is not in the package he sent. So Mitty stops imagining the trip and takes it, to Greenland, across Iceland, up a Himalayan ridge.

The watch goes the whole way, and no one has ever named it. Viewers have freeze-framed his wrist for years and come back with guesses that never hold, a Soviet Poljot one week, a vintage Heuer the next. The watch the film is actually remembered for is a different one. While the production was shooting in Iceland, Stiller walked into JS Watch Co. Reykjavik, the country's first watch manufacturer, and by the company's own account chose a Sif N.A.R.T. for himself: brushed steel, black dial, Arabic numerals, a black leather strap. The initials stand for North Atlantic Rescue Timer. It is a forty-millimeter diver rated to a thousand meters, built in honor of the Icelandic Coast Guard.

That watch never touches Walter Mitty's wrist. The nameless one does, through every daydream and the whole trip north, while Mitty learns to stop narrating his life and go live it. JS Watch Co. still keeps Stiller in the hall of fame on its shop wall, and the watch he actually wore as Mitty is not up there with him.