Colin Firth wears a Bulova

Eric Lomax was a British signals officer captured when Singapore fell in 1942 and put to work on the Thai-Burma railway, the line the Japanese drove through the jungle on the bodies of their prisoners. After his captors found a radio he had hidden, they tortured him. Decades later he learned that the interpreter who had been there for his interrogations was still alive, and went to find him. Jonathan Teplitzky's The Railway Man tells that story with Colin Firth as the older Lomax, Jeremy Irvine as the young one, Hiroyuki Sanada as Nagase, and Nicole Kidman as Patti, the wife who pulls the truth out of him.

The watch Firth wears is a Bulova, though the brand comes less from the film than from the prop itself: the screen-used 'hero watch,' the one Lomax wears throughout, was logged by a collector as an original Bulova that came straight from the production. On screen it is hard to catch. In the scene where the older Lomax walks back out onto the railway bridge, a plain light-dialed watch on a dark leather strap sits on his wrist, the kind of unshowy dress Bulova a man of his age and era would have owned, but the camera never stops on it long enough to read the dial.

Bulova fits him anyway. The company was founded in New York in 1875 and turned out huge numbers of accurate, affordable watches, many of them for servicemen, through both world wars. No specific model or reference is on record for the one in the film. What is on record is that it was a Bulova, and that Lomax wore it the whole way through.