Christian Bale wears a Rolex Day-Date

In American Hustle, set in the late 1970s, Christian Bale's Irving Rosenfeld stands with his arms folded and a cigar in his teeth, tinted aviators on and the comb-over carefully arranged, a yellow gold Rolex President Day-Date on the wrist he has folded over the other. The watch sits in a stack of gold bracelets. Writing up Bale's screen Rolexes, GQ singles this one out as the gold President he stacked with gold bracelets for the part of the larger-than-life hustler.

No reference number for the prop has been published, and the watch is never held long enough on camera to read one, so the identification stops where the evidence does: an 18k yellow gold Day-Date on its President bracelet. A gold President was the watch a 1970s operator bought to present himself, as one survey of Bale's screen watches puts it, as a man of good taste.

Bale wore the same watch again five years later. In Vice (2018) he plays Dick Cheney in another yellow gold Presidential Day-Date, and that time there was no costume decision to make. The real Cheney wore one, the first vice president to do so in office, and Bale simply matched him.