Cary Grant wears a Rolex Bubble Back

Destination Tokyo premiered in December 1943, with the war it depicts still being fought, and it was Delmer Daves's first time directing. Cary Grant plays Captain Cassidy, commander of the submarine USS Copperfin, ordered into Tokyo Bay itself to land a team and gather the weather intelligence the Doolittle Raid would fly on. Warner Bros. built the picture on a story by Steve Fisher, a former submariner, and the lived-in detail paid off twice over: Fisher's story earned an Academy Award nomination, and the Navy found the film accurate enough to use as a training tool for its own submariners. John Garfield rides along as a sailor called Wolf.

On Cassidy's wrist, caught in one closeup, is a Rolex Oyster Perpetual of the early self-winding type collectors call the Bubbleback, its sub-seconds register visible in the frame. The nickname comes from the swollen caseback that made room for the winding rotor. These were Rolex's first automatic watches, built from 1933 to 1955, with a domed crystal and a case of just 30 to 32 millimeters. The watch press reasoned about the casting plainly: a Cartier Tank, the watch Grant wore in his own life, would not do for a submariner, and the rugged, understated Oyster was the right tool. One profile adds that Grant cared about on-camera accuracy in general, and is said to have once swapped a set's prop paintings for artworks from his own collection.

Which exact reference sailed with the Copperfin has never been established. The reference numbers that appear alongside the write-ups, a 2764 here, a 3131 there, belong to stock photographs of the type rather than to the film. What the sources agree on is the model line and the fit: one of them calls the Bubbleback, with its robust build and its military association through films like this one, Rolex's equivalent of the field watches of the same period.