Cary Grant wears a Cartier Tank

Roger Thornhill is a Madison Avenue advertising man mistaken for a spy who does not exist, and he spends Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) being chased across a cornfield by a crop duster, framed for a murder at the United Nations, and hauled across the face of Mount Rushmore, all without surrendering his composure or his gray suit. Cary Grant brought something of his own to the part beyond the polish. The square gold watch on his left wrist was, by the standard account, his personal Cartier Tank, the model he had worn since around 1923 and one his chroniclers call as much a part of his wardrobe as the tailoring.

You will not get a good look at it. Thornhill's shirt cuffs cover the watch for most of the film, and the clearest sight comes in a train station washroom, where he shaves with Eve's tiny razor and the gold case slips into view. Even then the frame shows a square gold watch on a black strap and nothing more. One watch publication that went looking concluded the glimpses are not clear enough to tell a Cartier from any other tank-shaped watch of the era, and a rival account insists the watch was not a Cartier at all but Grant's own Patek Philippe, reference 2488, another square gold model, on an alligator strap. The Tank remains the standard identification, resting more on what everyone knows Grant wore than on what the film shows.