Gregory Peck wears a Gruen Precision

Captain Keith Mallory, an Allied spy and mountain climber by trade, is sent up a cliff face in the fall of 1943 to silence the German guns of Navarone, the island battery holding a Royal Navy rescue at bay. The clearest look at his watch arrives late in J. Lee Thompson's The Guns of Navarone (1961), and in borrowed clothes: Mallory, in a German Oberleutnant's uniform, checks the time as he and Miller plan their way into the fortress. The frame fills with a steel Gruen Precision, the brand and line printed on a plain silver dial under gold Arabic numerals, on a brown leather strap.

Precision, on a Gruen dial, was a place before it was a promise. The company kept its headquarters on Time Hill in Cincinnati, a 1917 building got up like a medieval guild hall, and made its better Swiss movements at a factory in Biel built in the early twenties and named the Precision Factory; the line took the factory's name. By the time Navarone reached theaters the company itself was already gone, the Gruen family having sold out in 1953 and the firm broken up and sold by 1958. The Biel works passed to the Aegler company in 1977 and stands today inside Rolex's manufacturing.