Humphrey Bogart wears a Longines Evidenza

Rick Blaine's watch in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) is one of cinema's most photographed wristwatches, and one of its most disputed identifications. Bogart wears a tonneau-shaped, almost-square gold case on a leather strap, visible most clearly when his dinner-jacketed arms rest on the table during the famous "play it again" piano scene and during the Paris flashback in the upstairs bar. The lug shape and case profile are the only details consistently visible.

Hodinkee's Watching Movies feature on Casablanca explicitly hedges on the identification. The watch is "purportedly a Longines" and "some have gone so far as to call it an Evidenza, though that is the subject of some level of conjecture." Bogart did own a tonneau, almost-square Longines himself, off-screen, which is part of why the Evidenza label stuck. Two competing theories also circulate: that the on-screen watch is a different Longines called the "Roosevelt," or that it is a square-cased Lord Elgin from the 1930s. The Evidenza name itself postdates the film by decades, since Longines launched the modern Evidenza line around 2003 in homage to vintage tonneau watches, so the label is at best a family resemblance, not an exact reference.

In 1942, Longines was among the top Swiss watchmakers, known for precision chronometers used at the Olympics and in aviation. A tonneau-case Longines (or contemporaneous Lord Elgin) on a leather strap was a quiet mark of good taste rather than a showpiece. On Rick Blaine it reads right either way. He is a man who had money once and kept the watch. Casablanca is a film about time running out. Rick and Ilsa had Paris and then they did not. The letters of transit have an expiration measured in hours. The watch on Rick's wrist keeps counting whether he is ready or not.