Jean-Paul Belmondo wears a Rolex Submariner

Thirty-six emeralds come out of a villa safe on the Mediterranean, and a policeman walks in while it is happening. In Henri Verneuil's Le Casse (1971), a remake of Paul Wendkos's 1957 film The Burglar, Jean-Paul Belmondo's Azad runs the crew, with Robert Hossein, Renato Salvatori and Dyan Cannon around him, and Omar Sharif plays Abel Zacharia, the corrupt Athens inspector who surprises the gang mid-heist and then hunts them for the stones rather than for the law. Ennio Morricone wrote the score. Rémy Julienne's team staged the car chase through Piraeus, and Belmondo handled his own falls, rolling down a rocky quarry hillside and leaping into a moving trolley, work later cited as an influence on action stars like Jackie Chan.

The Submariner is the French site Montres de Luxe's identification: a steel Submariner under an acrylic crystal, named without a frame from the film, and no stronger source has taken the claim up. A production still shows a steel bracelet sliding from the cuff of Azad's leather jacket as he points a pistol, consistent with the claim and nothing finer than that. The same site, writing about Ho! three years earlier, called Belmondo a sports-watch enthusiast with a particular taste for Rolex, and very probably the owner of the Submariner he wore in that film. None of it settles a reference here, and nobody has published one.

France did not wait for the paperwork. Le Casse sold 4.4 million tickets, the sixth biggest film of 1971, and held the number one spot at the French box office for six straight weeks.