Jean-Paul Belmondo wears a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona

Victor Vauthier lies the way other people breathe. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays him in Philippe de Broca's 1975 comedy Incorrigible, a small-time con man running several swindles at once under several names, with a stated ambition to raise the money to build a sea wall around Mont-Saint-Michel. Geneviève Bujold is Marie-Charlotte, the probation officer assigned to keep him honest; they fall for each other, which does not stop Victor from using her to get at the El Greco triptych in the Senlis museum where her father is the custodian. She works out the plan before he can finish it.

Victor wears a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, and it was Belmondo's own. Rolex built the Daytona from 1963 as a chronograph for racing drivers, with a tachymeter bezel for reading speed off elapsed time and the name of the Florida speedway on the dial. Belmondo's was the steel reference 6263, the one collectors call the Big Red, and it was his in life as well as on screen, worn across his films of the period back when actors still supplied their own watches. Christie's sold that watch in 2013 for 165,000 euros.