J.T. Walsh wears a Rolex

Robert Towne wrote Chinatown, then took the director's chair himself, and Tequila Sunrise, from 1988, was his third feature behind the camera. It stars Mel Gibson as a retired dealer trying to go straight, Kurt Russell as the detective who is also his oldest friend, and Michelle Pfeiffer as the restaurateur caught between them. J.T. Walsh plays Hal Maguire, the DEA agent leaning on the investigation, and in one office scene he rests his left elbow on a filing cabinet with a metal watch catching the light at his cuff. You can see that there is a watch. You cannot see which one. The dial, the bezel, the bracelet, all of it dissolves into soft focus and motion blur, and that half-glimpsed wrist is exactly the kind of thing that breeds a confident answer where there is none. The film's documented Rolexes belong to other men, with Russell wearing one and Gibson another. The only page that ever put a Rolex on Walsh called it a Submariner, while this watch had long been logged as a Datejust, and the two cannot both be right when neither is supported. So the honest reading is the modest one. There is a watch on Maguire's wrist, it may be a Rolex, and nothing on screen or in any reliable source will tell you more than that.