Glen Powell wears an IWC Pilot's Watches

Early in Devotion, when Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner first meet, Brown asks him straight out whether he flew in the Second World War. Hudner says he did not. As they talk, he fiddles with his shirt cuff, and the camera gets its first look at a small dark-dialed watch on his left wrist. It is an IWC reference 436, and it is the real thing. The production borrowed the watch directly from the IWC museum in Schaffhausen, and Hudner wears it for the rest of the film.

IWC first manufactured the model in 1936 and sold it as the Special Pilot's Watch. The dial carries Arabic numerals, a small seconds register at six, and the words Anti-Magnetique printed just beneath the hands; the movement is the hand-wound caliber 83, and the case wears a rotating bezel with an index for timing short stretches. Collectors call this watch the Mark IX, but that name came years later, applied backward once the military Mark X gave IWC's pilot line its numbering. It is also, strictly speaking, too old for the job: the model predates the Korean War by fourteen years, an odd watch for a young ensign in 1950. The Hodinkee writer who identified it saw the gap and chose to read the watch as a fictional heirloom.

J.D. Dillard directed Devotion from the true story of two men: Jesse Brown, the first African American naval aviator, and Tom Hudner, the wingman who received the Medal of Honor from President Truman after deliberately crash-landing his own plane in an attempt to aid Brown. The story runs from early 1950 to November of that year. Partway through, the squadron is ashore in Cannes, where Brown meets Elizabeth Taylor on the beach and comes away with an invitation for the pilots to join her at the casino. At the bar in service dress whites, Brown, who does not drink, orders a ginger beer, and both men's watches show beneath their cuffs. The bartender refuses to serve him anyway, and the two leave for a more welcoming room. Top Gun: Maverick had reached theaters just months before Devotion, which made 2022 the year Glen Powell played two naval aviators, an IWC pilot's watch on his wrist in both: a current model as Hangman, and as Hudner this one, lent out of the museum.