Bonnie Bedelia wears a Rolex Datejust

In the last minutes of Die Hard, Hans Gruber, shot and falling from the top of Nakatomi Plaza, catches Holly Gennaro's wrist and hangs there from her gold Rolex. John McClane reaches over and pops the clasp. The watch goes out the window with Gruber, and the movie is over. Die Hard may be the only action film that builds its ending around a wristwatch, and around a husband unbuckling one from his wife's arm.

In the film, the watch is a company prize. Holly's sleazy colleague Harry Ellis brags to McClane that Nakatomi gave her the watch as a measure of how much she means to the firm, and adds the only detail that matters to him: it's a Rolex. Holly has moved to Los Angeles, gone back to her maiden name, and climbed the corporate ladder while her cop husband stayed in New York, and the watch is the shorthand for all of it. When McClane lets it fall at the end, he is dropping Gruber and, in the same motion, the symbol of the life that pulled their marriage apart.

The watch is older than the movie, and meaner. Die Hard comes from a 1979 novel, Roderick Thorp's Nothing Lasts Forever, where the Holly figure is not a wife but an estranged daughter named Stephanie, and the company she works for really is the villain, an oil firm in bed with a Chilean junta. In the book she buys the fancy watch herself, she is apparently sleeping with the Ellis character and sharing his cocaine, and her father slowly understands that the watch is proof his daughter has been bought. The film kept the watch and threw out the guilt. It turned a mark of corruption into a mark of success, and then, at the very end, dropped it off a building.