Charlton Heston wears an unidentified watch

In a deserted Los Angeles where he may be the only uninfected human left alive, Robert Neville works the locks of his fortified apartment, and for a few seconds the camera catches the watch on his wrist. Charlton Heston plays Neville in The Omega Man, the 1971 film Boris Sagal directed from Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, the second screen version after Vincent Price's The Last Man on Earth in 1964. Neville is a military scientist who survived a biological war and now spends his nights barricaded against Matthias and the Family, a cult of light-sensitive mutants led by Anthony Zerbe, and his days hunting them through the empty city.

It is an all-gold watch, a gold dial on a gold bracelet, and Neville wears it the way a certain kind of military man does, dial turned to the inside of the wrist. That habit keeps the crystal from catching light or snagging on a rifle, and on a soldier it reads as training rather than vanity. You see it best as he works a lock or shoulders the red-scoped rifle he fires from his window, dressed incongruously in a green velvet smoking jacket, a survivor who has decided that if he is the last man in the city he may as well live like a king in it. The film practically dares you to name the brand, since he is the Omega man after all, but the title describes Neville's survivorship, not the maker on his wrist, and the watch is glimpsed only briefly, never long enough for a logo to resolve. So the honest reading is the one the film leaves: a survivor in an empty world, wearing a gold watch turned quietly inward, its maker known only to him.