Christopher Walken wears a Lancet Trench Watch

It is the most famous watch scene in film history, and the watch itself almost does not matter. Christopher Walken's Captain Koons delivers a monologue to a young Butch Coolidge about a gold watch that survived three generations of war, hidden for five years in the most uncomfortable place imaginable. Quentin Tarantino wrote the speech, and it drives Butch's whole arc in Pulp Fiction: he goes back for the watch knowing Marsellus Wallace wants him dead.

The prop is a Lancet trench watch, a gold-filled World War I-era piece built on a converted pocket-watch case with wire lugs soldered on to take a strap, the kind of conversion common in the early 1900s before purpose-built wristwatches arrived. According to Hodinkee, the prop master found the 1918 watch in an antique store and showed it to Tarantino and Bruce Willis, who both knew at once it was the one. The script calls its maker "the first company to ever make wristwatches," which is not historically accurate, but the monologue was never about accuracy.