James Mason wears an Omega

In the opening minutes of Michael Powell's Age of Consent, the painter Bradley Morahan (James Mason) stops outside a New York shop window. Set into the window is a small aquarium, and hanging in the water among the coral is a wristwatch on a leather strap. The camera holds on it long enough to read the dial: a pale-faced Omega, the brand name and logo clear above the center, a date window at three. Powell arrives at the shot through a match cut that carries the audience from the Great Barrier Reef, the setting for the rest of the film, to this reef behind glass in Manhattan.

The watch is a store display rather than anything Morahan wears. Lowering a watch into an aquarium was a common way to advertise water resistance, which in 1969 was the province of the Omega Seamaster, though the model line printed below the brand name cannot be made out in the frame. Morahan studies the display, glances at his own wristwatch, and hails a taxi to his gallery opening.