Harrison Ford wears an unidentified watch

Harrison Ford is in Apocalypse Now for about two minutes. He plays the colonel who, in a wood-paneled office near the start, briefs Captain Willard on the job of going upriver to kill Kurtz. He also named the character himself. Ford had the wardrobe department stitch LUCAS onto the name tape of his fatigues, after George Lucas, who had cast him as the drag-racing Bob Falfa in American Graffiti. The joke reportedly sailed past its target. George Lucas, the story goes, never noticed he was in the film.

The watch he wears in that office has none of this paper trail. The film's famous wrists belong to Martin Sheen, who wore his own Seiko 6105, and Marlon Brando, who tore the bezel off a Rolex GMT-Master. The men back at headquarters were never given the same scrutiny, and Ford's colonel least of all. In the still that survives, a wide and dim shot of the salute that ends the briefing, you cannot make out the watch on his wrist, let alone read it. No one has identified it.

Ford was not a star yet when Coppola filmed this in 1976. Star Wars was still a year from opening, and the casting director Fred Roos had been quietly shuttling him between Lucas and Coppola for years. By the time the film opened in 1979, the throwaway colonel was Han Solo, one of the most famous faces in the world, and still no one was looking at his watch.