George Segal wears an unidentified watch

In this Columbia Pictures still, George Segal cups a lighter to a cigarette while another prisoner watches him through a gap in the hut wall. A watch rides his wrist on a bracelet of metal links. Only the bracelet shows; the dial stays turned away from the lens.

This is King Rat, Bryan Forbes's 1965 adaptation of James Clavell's first novel, which Clavell built from his own imprisonment in Changi. Segal plays Corporal King, the American among British and Australian prisoners in a Japanese camp where most men are starving. King does not starve. He runs the camp's black market and lives on the margin he takes from every deal, well fed and in clean clothes while the men around him go hungry.

Watches are part of that trade, the kind of valuable a man swaps for food. King is the trader who moves them through the camp, and the watch on his own wrist is the one that keeps its face turned from the camera. A film-watch index once tagged it an Omega, a single uncited line with nothing behind it, and the black and white film backs none of it. When British paratroopers reach the camp at the war's end, the clean, healthy look that set King apart is the first thing they hold against him, and the man who ran the black market behind the wire is suddenly just a corporal again.