Cary Elwes wears a CWC G40 Series

In Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, Cary Elwes plays Nathan Jasmine, the intelligence handler who runs the operation from a safe distance. The watch suits the man. It barely shows under the cuff of his glen-check three-piece, just a dark strap and a fleck of red at the wrist.

It is a CWC Sonar, reference 74116 in the brand's G40 series. CWC stands for Cabot Watch Company, a British maker that has built military watches for over fifty years, and it dressed three of the film's characters: Bugzy Malone's JJ Davies in the Pilots Chronograph, Peter Ferdinando's Mike in the SBS diver, and Elwes in the Sonar. The Sonar is the strange one. Its dial is a miniaturised CWC stopwatch face, the kind the company built by the thousand for timing torpedoes aboard submarines, which is where the name comes from, and for counting news segments in the cutting rooms of the BBC and ITV.

CWC took that stopwatch dial, adapted it from seconds to hours, and built it into a field watch: a 40mm steel case, domed sapphire crystal, an ETA Swiss quartz movement, water resistance to 200 meters, about 400 pounds. The screw-down red crown is the tell. By the company's own account it is an homage to the CWC stopwatch Tom Cruise used in Mission: Impossible - Fallout. It is a stopwatch that learned to tell the time.