Bruce Lee wears a Seiko 6139-6010

Bruce Lee never saw the film that made him a global star. He died on July 20, 1973, at thirty-two, about a month before Enter the Dragon opened. Robert Clouse directed it and Warner Bros. made it for around 850,000 dollars, a budget it would multiply several hundred times over into an estimated 400 million dollars worldwide. John Saxon and Jim Kelly play the two Americans who join Lee at a martial arts tournament on a private island. Among the uncredited guards are a young Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, neither yet famous enough to be billed.

The watch is a Seiko 6139-6010, and the story behind it is partly about Lee and partly about the movement inside it. Seiko introduced the 6139 caliber in 1969 as one of the first self-winding chronographs ever built, arriving the same year as the Zenith El Primero and the Chrono-Matic caliber 11, with a column wheel and a vertical clutch driving the chronograph. The 6139-6010 is the black-dial, day-date version with an internal rotating bezel. Lee wore one for years, from the late 1960s until his death, and turns up in photograph after photograph with it on his wrist, which is why collectors now call this reference the Bruce Lee.

What is harder to pin down is the watch on screen. The well-known images of Lee in the 6139-6010 are personal and on-set photographs rather than frames from the movie, and no reliable source documents the chronograph during the action of Enter the Dragon itself. The reference is his beyond question. Its appearance in this particular film is a claim that rests, for now, on the association rather than on a clear shot of the dial.