Clive Brook wears a Hamilton Flintridge

Aboard a train bound for Shanghai in 1932, a woman asks a British officer for the time. Captain Donald Harvey, played by Clive Brook, lifts the hinged metal cover of his wristwatch, and the film cuts in close: inside the lid sits a photograph of the woman asking, his former lover Shanghai Lily, played by Marlene Dietrich, and beneath it an Art Deco dial that plainly reads HAMILTON. The watch is a Hamilton Flintridge, advertised in its day as the out-of-doors watch with a cover, and Hamilton dates the start of its entire Hollywood career to this film: 1932, the brand's first starring role on screen.

Josef von Sternberg directed Shanghai Express, the fourth of the seven films he and Dietrich made together. It earned three Academy Award nominations, winning Best Cinematography for Lee Garmes while losing Best Picture to Grand Hotel, and it was a box office success, taking a million and a half dollars in worldwide rentals. The plot strands its passengers in China's civil war: the warlord Henry Chang commandeers the train, and the crisis ends when Hui Fei, the fellow passenger played by Anna May Wong, kills him.

Hamilton's own account of the film names two of its watches, the Flintridge and a Piping Rock, and calls them much more than mere props, pieces with an integral part in the plot. The ending shows what the brand means. At the Shanghai station, Harvey finds Lily while she is buying him a new watch, and asks her to forgive him for his lack of faith. They kiss in the bustle of the station. A film that hides her face inside one Hamilton ends with her buying him another.