Dustin Hoffman wears a Rolex GMT-Master

David Sumner moves to Cornwall to get away from America, and Cornwall does not want him. In Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), Dustin Hoffman plays an American mathematician who settles with his wife Amy, played by Susan George, in her home village near St Buryan, where the local men's hostility builds from broken civility to a siege of the couple's farmhouse. The film comes from Gordon M. Williams' novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm, and Peckinpah pushed it somewhere the novel never went: the rape scene he added earned the film an X certificate in Britain, a trimmed R in America, and a ban from British home video that lasted until 2002. The title reaches back further than any of it. In the Tao Te Ching, straw dogs are ceremonial figures discarded without a thought once the ritual ends. Jerry Fielding's score brought the film its Academy Award nomination.

The steel Rolex on David's wrist belonged to Hoffman. The French site Montres de Luxe identifies a GMT-Master reference 1675 and calls it, without any doubt in its words, Hoffman's personal watch, the same one he wears in Marathon Man and Kramer vs. Kramer. The fuller story circulates among Rolex historians: in the late 1960s a Rolex U.S.A. executive named T. Walker Lloyd gave Hoffman a red-and-blue GMT-Master, and Hoffman wore it for decades, on screen and off. In Marathon Man he hands it over to pay a taxi fare.

By the time Straw Dogs reached theaters, the watch was simply part of how Hoffman dressed, and it outlasted the decade. The same GMT was on his wrist in 1980 when he accepted the Academy Award for Best Actor.