Jack Lemmon wears an unidentified watch

Twelve days after The China Syndrome opened in theaters, the Three Mile Island nuclear plant suffered a partial meltdown. Nobody planned that. James Bridges directed the film as a thriller about a television news crew that witnesses an accident at a nuclear power plant, and Jack Lemmon plays Jack Godell, the shift supervisor who realizes the situation is far worse than the utility company is admitting. Lemmon won Best Actor at Cannes for it. He plays Godell as a man being slowly crushed between what he knows and what he's allowed to say, and the performance is one of the best things he ever did.

Godell wears a watch throughout the film, visible as he monitors gauges and argues with plant management, but the brand and model have not been identified. For a nuclear plant supervisor in the late 1970s, a no-nonsense tool watch would be standard. Godell is an engineer, not a businessman. He doesn't accessorize. He checks readouts, runs calculations, and tries to keep the reactor from killing everyone in a thirty-mile radius. The watch is functional equipment, like everything else in that control room.