Josh Brolin wears a Waltham

Hail, Caesar! (2016) gives Eddie Mannix's wristwatch a close-up that lasts only a beat: a small octagonal case on a brown leather strap, a cream dial crowded with black Arabic numerals and a sub-seconds register at six, and under the twelve the maker's name, Waltham. Josh Brolin plays Mannix, the fixer for Capitol Pictures whom the Coen Brothers borrowed loosely from the real Eddie Mannix, the MGM enforcer of the same name. The film follows him through one long day of early 1950s Hollywood as he puts out fires: a kidnapped leading man (George Clooney), an unmarried pregnant starlet (Scarlett Johansson), a cowboy actor stranded in a drawing-room picture (Alden Ehrenreich), and a standing offer from Lockheed to quit the movie business for serious work.

The watch is the eight-sided dress style the American Waltham Watch Company built in the 1920s, its case sides engraved, its hands blued. Waltham made watches in Waltham, Massachusetts from 1850 onward, and by Mannix's day it was losing the wristwatch trade it had been slow to enter; the company stopped making watches in 1957. So the man who holds a modern studio together checks the time on an antique from a fading American maker, a watch already a generation older than the suit around it. Waltham had built the first American factory to mass-produce the watch, the plant that proved a movement could be assembled from interchangeable parts rather than fitted by hand.