Guy Marchand wears a Breitling Navitimer

Guy Marchand plays Hubert Delambre in L'Hôtel de la plage, Michel Lang's 1978 comedy about a crowd of vacationers at a hotel on the Brittany coast. It runs on the usual machinery of an August seaside farce, with husbands and wives both arranging quiet infidelities while the teenagers fall in and out of love. Sophie Barjac and Anne Parillaud are among the younger cast.

The watch is identified as a Breitling Navitimer, the pilot's chronograph Breitling introduced in 1952, with a circular slide rule on the bezel for the calculations a pilot makes in the air. It is a lot of watch for a beach holiday. But the identification comes from a single watch publication. It carries no photograph and no reference number, and it reckons the Navitimer was probably Marchand's own rather than a costume piece, worn again in his films of the same period. Marchand turns up in the few stills that survive from the film, but never with his wrist clear enough to confirm it.