Jack Hawkins wears a Jaeger-LeCoultre

Lieutenant-Colonel Hyde does his recruiting by post. Seven envelopes go out, each holding an American crime paperback called The Golden Fleece, half a five pound note, and an unsigned invitation to lunch at the Cafe Royal, and the seven ex-officers who open them all have something in their pasts and a use for the other half of the note. Basil Dearden's The League of Gentlemen (1960), written by Bryan Forbes from John Boland's novel, runs the bank job that follows like a military operation, down to a weapons raid on an army training camp in Dorset that the gang carries out in uniform and pins on the IRA. Forbes kept a part for himself, Porthill. Jack Hawkins plays Hyde.

The film keeps time out loud, and Hyde keeps it on a Jaeger-LeCoultre. On the morning the gang times the bank's routine, a traffic officer stops him so a boy can cross the street, and he checks the watch; two minutes later he checks it again outside the bank with Mycroft. Back in uniform for the arms raid, he reads it once more and tells Mycroft and Race to put out their cigarettes. Which Jaeger-LeCoultre it is has never been pinned down; the brand is as far as the identification goes. Porthill, for his part, checks a Smiths. A film this devoted to showing the time made natural material for Christian Marclay's The Clock, where several of these moments now mark the very minutes they display.