Benedict Cumberbatch wears a Breitling Unitime

Greville Wynne was not a spy. He was a British electrical engineer and salesman who traveled to Moscow for trade fairs, which made him useful to MI6 when it needed someone to carry intelligence out of Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU colonel passing Soviet missile secrets to the West. Dominic Cooke directed The Courier (2020) from a screenplay by Tom O'Connor, and Benedict Cumberbatch lost noticeable weight for the scenes of Wynne's deterioration in a Soviet prison. Rachel Brosnahan plays the CIA officer, Merab Ninidze plays Penkovsky, and Jessie Buckley plays Wynne's wife. The real Wynne was arrested in 1962 and freed in a 1964 spy swap.

On Wynne's wrist is a gold Breitling Unitime, identified by the watch press from a close-up in the film's first half hour. Breitling launched the Unitime in 1951, a world-time watch that arranges 24 time zones on a rotating ring, made for the new reach of intercontinental air travel. It is a fitting watch for a 1960s businessman moving between London and Moscow, and consistent with the film's period.