Cary Grant wears a Cartier Tank

The Philadelphia Story exists because Katharine Hepburn engineered it. Branded box office poison after a run of flops, she starred in Philip Barry's play on Broadway, bought the film rights with Howard Hughes's help, and returned to Hollywood owning her own comeback. Cary Grant agreed to play the ex-husband, C.K. Dexter Haven, a socialite yacht designer, on two conditions: top billing and a salary of a hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars, all of which he donated to British war relief. George Cukor directed. The film took six Academy Award nominations and won two, James Stewart for Best Actor and Donald Ogden Stewart for the adaptation, and the wedding at its center ends with Tracy Lord canceling one groom and remarrying Dexter.

On Dexter's wrist through the summery scenes sits a small square-cased watch on a light leather strap, probably tan, a band conspicuously paler than the black and brown straps most men wore in 1940. That much the frame establishes. The Cartier Tank identification is an inference built on top of it, and an open one: Grant wore his own Tank from 1923, when he was about twenty, which makes his one of the earliest examples on any famous wrist, and he kept wearing the model for the rest of his life. The style writers who examined Dexter's wardrobe shot by shot put the call carefully: very possibly a Cartier. Nobody has put it more strongly, and the frame, a pale-strapped square at the edge of legibility, does not settle it.

Barry's play kept the action at the Lord estate, and MGM shot the film in six weeks at Culver City in the summer of 1940, which is why Dexter spends so much of it in warm-weather tailoring: the collarless jacket, silk trousers, loafers, and the pale-strapped watch among them. More than eight decades on, the strongest claim anyone has made for that watch is still the careful one: very possibly a Cartier.