Clark Gable wears a Rolex Oyster Perpetual

Mogambo handed Clark Gable the strangest assignment of his career: a role he had already played. The film is a remake of Red Dust, from 1932, with Gable as Victor Marswell in both versions two decades apart, and this time the setting is Africa, where Marswell captures big game for the world's zoos and leads safaris through the savanna. John Ford shot on location in Kenya, Uganda and the French Congo, and he refused to let a composer near the picture: apart from Ava Gardner at a player piano, every note of music in the film comes from local traditional performers. Gardner earned an Academy Award nomination as the stranded American showgirl, Grace Kelly another as the visiting anthropologist's wife, and the triangle among the three of them is the whole story.

The watch on Marswell's wrist needs no identification debate, because the watch itself survives. It is a Rolex Oyster Perpetual reference 6011 in fourteen karat yellow gold, dated by the auction catalogs to around 1940, with a detail collectors love: the dial carries the name of Brock and Company, the retailer who sold it, printed alongside Rolex's own. It was Gable's personal watch. He bought it from Brock, wore it through Mogambo on a leather strap, and kept wearing it for a good part of his life. When Bonhams sold it in 2013, the lot included a photograph of Gable wearing the watch and a copy of the film, and the hammer settled at twenty-eight thousand seven hundred fifty dollars.

Most watches in films from 1953 survive as soft frames and educated guesses. This one exists: photographed on Gable's wrist, catalogued with the estate of Clark Gable as its provenance, its faded off-white dial and textured black leather strap still being described by the style press in the present tense.