Dustin Hoffman wears a Timex

Dustin Hoffman spends most of Ishtar sweating through desert robes, and the watch on Chuck Clarke's wrist spends most of the film hidden under a sleeve. It is a Timex, a plain digital watch of the kind the company sold by the millions in the 1980s. The camera never settles on it long enough to read a model, and there is none to pin down past the brand.

Ishtar opened in May 1987 as one of the most expensive comedies Hollywood had financed, a reported fifty-one-million-dollar production, and it came back as one of the era's most expensive flops, earning a fraction of that. Elaine May directed, her last feature behind the camera. Warren Beatty produced and co-starred. The plot runs thinner than the budget: Hoffman and Beatty play Chuck Clarke and Lyle Rogers, two songwriters with no talent who take a booking in Morocco and walk into a Cold War standoff between the CIA and left-wing guerrillas in the fictional country of Ishtar, with a blind camel and a map both sides want thrown in.

On a production this lavish and this doomed, a sub-fifty-dollar Timex is the most modest object in the frame, and even it stays out of focus. Timex built the decade on that exact promise, a cheap watch that took a licking and kept ticking, and Ishtar handed one to a man who could not write a song or find his way out of the sand.