Christopher Walken wears an unidentified watch

Clairton, Pennsylvania, before the war. Nick Chevotarevich is the gentlest of the steelworkers in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, the friend who jokes at the wedding and the hunting cabin and then comes apart completely in Saigon. Christopher Walken won an Academy Award for him. He is one of five friends the film follows from a Pennsylvania mill town into Vietnam and, for most of them, back again.

The watch turns up in a black-and-white cast photograph, where the five men stand together in flannel and work jackets. On Walken's crossed wrist is a steel watch on a metal bracelet, and a watches-in-film catalog has long called it a Rolex Submariner. A close look does not support that. The Submariner has a black dial and a rotating dive bezel, and the watch on Walken's wrist has a pale dial and no bezel at all. What brand it is cannot be read from the photograph, and no watch writer who has gone looking has pinned Nick's watch down. The only watch in The Deer Hunter anyone has documented is De Niro's, a Rolex Sea-Dweller, and it is not the one on Nick's wrist.