Fritz Lang wears a Rolex Air-King

Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963) casts Fritz Lang as Fritz Lang. Jerry Prokosch, an American producer played by Jack Palance, has hired the Austrian director to film an adaptation of the Odyssey, then brings in a French playwright, Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), to rework the script. Brigitte Bardot plays Javal's wife Camille, whose contempt for her husband gives the film its title and its story. The doubling runs through the crew: Godard plays Lang's assistant director, and Raoul Coutard, who shot the picture, plays the cameraman. The production filmed at the Cinecitta studios in Rome and at Casa Malaparte, the cliff-top villa on Capri.

Lang was born in 1890; he had made Metropolis in 1927 and M in 1931, and he left Germany for good in 1933. The watch on his wrist in Contempt has been identified exactly once, in a French watch listing that called it a Rolex Air-King and reasoned that, since Lang was playing himself, it was surely his own. No second source documents the watch, and the identification has never been tested against a clear frame.

The Air-King would at least fit the man's era. Rolex introduced it in 1945 to honor the RAF pilots of the war, one of four Air models alongside the Air-Lion, Air-Tiger, and Air-Giant, in a modest 34-millimetre case. The other three disappeared from the catalogue long ago. The Air-King outlasted them all, and Rolex still makes it today.