Gary Oldman wears a Breguet Pocket Watch No. 765 (replica)

Winston Churchill sits in a wood-paneled study with a cigar in one hand, and across his black waistcoat runs a chain of long gold links, the kind that ends in a pocket watch. The watch it leads to has a name. Breguet pocket watch No. 765, commissioned in 1890 by Churchill's grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough, carried both a split-seconds chronograph and a minute repeater, and the family called it "the Turnip." According to Churchill's great-grandson, Sir Winston always had it with him, which is why it features so prominently in Joe Wright's Darkest Hour (2017), the film that put Gary Oldman under hours of prosthetics and won him the Academy Award.

Anthony McCarten's screenplay confines itself to Churchill's first weeks as Prime Minister in May 1940, when the cabinet's question was whether to negotiate with Hitler or fight on alone. The original Turnip could not take the role itself: it still belongs to the Churchill family and sits on display at the Churchill War Rooms, part of the Imperial War Museum in London. So Breguet's workshops built a stand-in, faithful in nearly every exterior detail, down to the enamel dial and the Duke of Marlborough's coat of arms engraved on the caseback, though without the grand complication movement inside.

The replica departs from the original in exactly one visible way. Churchill's watch had an unsigned dial, with the signature hidden on the inner case. The film's watch, as SJX noted, "is prominently marked 'Breguet', giving the brand some screen time," a detail one watch roundup called "a tiny anachronism."