George Macready wears a Rolex Oyster Royal

My Name Is Julia Ross (1945) locks a young woman inside someone else's identity. Julia takes a live-in secretary's job in London, is drugged, and wakes two days later in a clifftop house on the coast where the household insists she is Marion, the wife of Ralph Hughes. George Macready plays Ralph, the man they call her husband and the film's real danger. Worn & Wound's vintage screen-watch roundup catches him checking "his Rolex Oyster Royal," notes its Mercedes hands, and adds a collector's wince: "he should take care of that crown."

The Oyster Royal was Rolex's plainer Oyster of the 1930s and 1940s, a small steel watch wound by hand rather than by rotor. Its value was in the case. Rolex built the Oyster in 1926 around a screw-down crown that sealed the movement against water and dust, the trick that let it claim to be the first wristwatch a person could really call waterproof. That is what makes the column's aside land: of all the parts to neglect on an Oyster, the crown is the one the whole design rests on.