Deborah Kerr wears an Ingersoll Waterbury

At two minutes to six in the morning, Black Narcissus cuts to Sister Clodagh's open palm and the pocketwatch lying in it: black dial, gilt Arabic numerals, a small seconds register ringed by the words Made in U.S.A., and the maker's name printed plainly beneath the twelve, Ingersoll, above the single word Waterbury. Deborah Kerr plays Clodagh, the young Sister Superior sent to plant a convent in the palace of Mopu, a former harem standing on a high Himalayan cliff, and the keeping of the hours is literally her job: it is Clodagh who climbs to the cliff edge to ring the great bell.

The watch in her hand was the opposite of exotic. Robert Ingersoll and his brother ran a New York mail-order business that in 1892 ordered ten thousand cheap watches from the Waterbury Clock Company of Waterbury, Connecticut, paying eighty-five cents apiece and selling them at a dollar. By 1896 the price was the whole product: the Ingersoll Yankee sold for exactly one dollar, the watch that made the dollar famous, and by 1910 the Waterbury factory was turning out three and a half million watches a year for the Ingersoll brothers. Ingersoll went bankrupt in 1921, and the Waterbury Clock Company bought the name itself the following year for a million and a half dollars. The pocketwatch in Clodagh's palm wears both names.

Nothing else in the film is so plainly what it claims to be. The Himalayas that dwarf the convent were painted by W. Percy Day; the production never left England, shooting at Pinewood Studios and in the gardens at Leonardslee in West Sussex, and the result won two Academy Awards, for Jack Cardiff's Technicolor photography and for Alfred Junge's art direction. Michael Powell doubted that Deborah Kerr was old enough to play Clodagh; Emeric Pressburger insisted, and she gave the production fifty-five days of work for sixteen thousand pounds. The story ends where her timekeeping lives: Sister Ruth, unraveling, attacks Clodagh at the bell on the cliff edge and falls to her death.