Herbert Lom wears a Croton Dress Watch

Gambit (1966), Ronald Neame's caper, opens with the perfect crime. Michael Caine's con man lays out a flawless plan to rob a reclusive tycoon, and the film plays it through exactly as imagined before rewinding to show how badly it actually goes. The mark is Ahmed Shahbandar, played by Herbert Lom, better known as the twitching Inspector Dreyfus of the Pink Panther films. Here he is all stillness and money, and the film gives his wealth away in a single close-up of his wrist: a silver-dialed watch under a faceted, diamond-set bezel, a date window near two, on a steel mesh bracelet, the dial reading CROTON. Croton was an American company that sold Swiss-made watches, tied for decades to the maker Nivada Grenchen, so its mid-1960s dials often read Croton or Croton Nivada. A watch reading simply CROTON is the right period piece for a discreetly rich collector in 1966. The model never resolves on screen, but the brand is unmistakable: CROTON, in plain letters, on the wrist of the film's wealthiest man.