David Niven wears an unidentified watch

Peter Carter talks to a woman he has never met as his Lancaster bomber burns over the English Channel. He knows he is going to die. No parachute, crew dead, one engine left. He uses his last minutes of radio contact to fall in love with an American radio operator named June. He should die, and when he doesn't, heaven wants to know why. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made A Matter of Life and Death (1946) as a film about a bureaucratic gap between life and death, with David Niven playing Carter before a celestial court that wants to correct the clerical error of his survival.

Carter wears a gold rectangular watch that appears to be a Tank-style dress piece — slim case, Art Deco lines, leather strap. On an RAF squadron leader, it reads as a personal possession rather than military issue, which fits a character described as a poet in uniform. The specific brand is not identifiable from available stills. A gold rectangular watch in 1946 narrows the field to Cartier, Jaeger-LeCoultre, or one of several Swiss makers producing that form factor between the wars. Whatever it is, it belongs to the world of the living, which is exactly Carter's argument.