Cary Grant wears a Rolex Oyster Royal

Partway through Stanley Donen's Charade (1963), Cary Grant's character crouches at a door and rigs a tripwire, and the camera moves in close enough to make out the steel watch at his white cuff. The man wearing it calls himself Peter Joshua, then Alexander Dyle, then Adam Canfield, and turns out in the end to be Brian Cruikshank, while Audrey Hepburn's Reggie Lampert spends the film, shot on location in Paris, trying to work out which of those men actually exists. Grant turned fifty-nine during filming and was sensitive about the twenty-five years between himself and his thirty-three-year-old co-star.

The watch is a Rolex Oyster Royal, a steel, time-only model from a line Rolex introduced in 1933, when a center seconds hand was still worth advertising. It got the part for a practical reason. Grant's own daily watch was a time-only Cartier Tank, as much a part of his wardrobe as the tailoring, and the Tank could not meet the one requirement this role imposed: the watch had to be water resistant. Cruikshank takes a shower mid-film, points at the Rolex on his wrist, and says, "Waterproof." That line and the tripwire close-up are the two moments the watch gets at close range, and the tripwire frame shows it plainly, bright steel case and bracelet against the white cuff.