Clark Gable wears a Cartier Tank

Clark Gable wears a Cartier Tank in Red Dust, the 1932 pre-Code picture where he runs a rubber plantation in Indochina and ends up between Jean Harlow and Mary Astor. In his era the Tank was barely a production watch. Between 1919 and 1960 Cartier's Paris workshop made only 1,803 of them, sold to bankers like the Mellons and the Rothschilds and the occasional movie star.

Gable's is an oddity even by those standards. Harry Fane, the dealer often called the man who knows more about Cartier than Cartier does, has looked at it and cannot place it. This Tank has Arabic numerals, where almost every Tank has Roman, and a small subsidiary seconds dial set into the face. Cartier made versions like this in tiny runs. Fane guesses there may have been only three, or that Gable ordered the Arabic dial specially. Either way, no one has turned up a matching example, not even Fane.