Billy Bob Thornton wears an Elgin De Luxe

I keep coming back to how little Ed Crane says. Joel and Ethan Coen shot The Man Who Wasn't There in black and white in 2001 and put Billy Bob Thornton behind a barber's chair in 1949 Santa Rosa, a man who narrates his own slow unraveling - a blackmail scheme, a death, an affair - while barely saying a word out loud. His watch keeps the same secret. There's one shot where his sleeve rides up over a client's head and I catch a polished metal case on a flexible bracelet, the dial turned away, never quite legible. So what is it? The real watch Thornton wore went to auction at Propstore as Lot 225, listed plainly as an Elgin De Luxe. And Elgin, it turns out, was no boutique. Founded in 1864, the company ran its factory in Elgin, Illinois until it shut the American lines in 1968, and across that century it built something like sixty million watches - one of the most common vintage names you can still buy cheap today. Not a Swiss icon. The plain American workhorse a small-town barber in 1949 actually would have worn.