Gregory Peck wears a Breitling Navitimer

In one frame from Captain Newman, M.D. (1963), Gregory Peck sits at the wheel of a jeep in officer's khaki, Tony Curtis leaning in at the window, a black-dialed chronograph on a dark leather strap on Peck's left wrist. Press accounts from the time identified the watch as a Breitling Navitimer that belonged to Curtis; Peck decided it suited his character and borrowed it for the shoot. The two stars were also the film's co-producers, Peck through his Brentwood Productions and Curtis through Reynard Productions, so the loan stayed inside the production.

Newman is Captain Josiah J. Newman, the Army psychiatrist who runs Ward 7, the neuro-psychiatric ward of the Colfax Army Air Field hospital in the Arizona desert in 1944. Richard L. Breen and the husband-and-wife team of Henry and Phoebe Ephron, Nora Ephron's parents, adapted the screenplay from Leo Rosten's 1961 novel. The patients are the men the air war sent back: Robert Duvall plays a captain gone catatonic from guilt after evading capture in occupied Europe, and Bobby Darin took an Oscar nomination as Corporal Jim Tompkins, who relives being shot down under sodium pentothal, returns to duty, and is killed in combat.

The Navitimer itself was a working instrument. Breitling designed it in 1952 with a beaded slide-rule bezel that let a pilot run in-flight calculations, flight plans, fuel consumption, average speed, and in 1954 the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association adopted it as its official timepiece; the name is a contraction of navigation and timer. In the film, the pilot's calculator sits on the wrist of the psychiatrist who treats the fliers.