Frankie Howerd wears a Tissot Chronograph

In Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers (1955), his last film for Ealing, a gang led by Alec Guinness rents rooms from the elderly Mrs. Wilberforce in her house by King's Cross, poses as a string quintet with Boccherini on the gramophone, and pulls off a security van robbery without a hitch. The robbery is the easy part. Their undoing begins when a cello case full of banknotes jams in her front door, and it ends with the thieves drawing matchsticks over who must kill the old lady, none of them able to go through with it. Frankie Howerd has a few minutes in all this as the Barrow Boy, the street vendor whose run-in with Mrs. Wilberforce over the treatment of his cart horse snarls the gang's timing.

Around the twenty fifth minute the film fills the screen with his watch. The close-up shows a Tissot chronograph in tricompax layout: the cursive Tissot signature under the 12, three registers counting running seconds, elapsed minutes, and elapsed hours, Arabic numerals, and a steel bracelet. Tissot had been building watches in Le Locle since 1853, and the one on the Barrow Boy's wrist is legible down to the brand name. It is not even the film's only Tissot. Alec Guinness wears one as Professor Marcus.