Dustin Hoffman wears a Rolex GMT-Master

The Rolex GMT-Master on Hoffman's wrist was his own, a gift in the late 1960s from T. Walker Lloyd, an executive at Rolex USA. Hoffman wore it for decades, in his films and out of them, and had it on when he collected the Best Actor Oscar in 1980. In Marathon Man it becomes a plot point: Babe Levy, a graduate student pulled into a conspiracy he cannot follow, hands the Rolex to a cab driver as fare while on the run, asking only for a dime back to make a phone call. John Schlesinger directed from William Goldman's adaptation of his own novel, the one with Laurence Olivier as a Nazi dentist leaning over Hoffman with a drill, asking "Is it safe?"

The GMT-Master is Rolex's travel watch, with a fourth hand and a two-color bezel for reading a second time zone, and the reference 1675 was the version Rolex made from 1959 to 1980: a steel case, an aluminum bezel insert in the red-and-blue "Pepsi" colors, an acrylic crystal. A cab driver taking a Rolex as fare was a believable bit of business even in 1976, when the watch already carried its reputation as something you could turn back into cash anywhere.