Christian Bale wears a Cartier Tank

In Public Enemies, Michael Mann's 2009 telling of the Dillinger manhunt, Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who ran the chase. Most of what the film gives you of Purvis is motion: Bale at night behind a car, a Thompson bucking in his hands, the muzzle flash washing out the frame. What it does not give you, at least not in any clear way, is his watch.

That has not stopped people from trying to name it. One French watch site identifies the piece as a Cartier Tank Chinoise in platinum, the 1922 design with heavy horizontal bars framing a rectangular dial, and goes further, calling this particular one a modern reissue from Cartier's Collection Privée, which would put it some seventy years out of period for 1934. A crowd-sourced prop database is less certain: there the watch sits unidentified, with a commenter guessing a Cartier Santos instead. The most careful costume study of the character inventories his clothes down to a gold signet ring and names no watch at all. The brand keeps coming up Cartier. The model will not settle, and no available frame shows his wrist clearly enough to decide it.