Kevin Costner wears a Bulova

Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) is less interested in historical accuracy than in building a myth: Eliot Ness against Al Capone, the lawman who would not take a bribe against the gangster who bribed everyone. Kevin Costner plays Ness as an earnest Boy Scout in a city that eats Boy Scouts for breakfast, a federal agent in early-1930s Chicago trying to bring Capone down on the books.

The watch on his wrist is a period dress watch, and the screen-used piece survives. Prop Store auctioned it in a lot that gathered the watches of three of the film's leads, Ness, Sean Connery's Jim Malone, and Charles Martin Smith's Oscar Wallace, and cataloged Ness's as a facsimile Bulova: a prop built to resemble the American brand rather than a numbered production model. It still carried adhesive and Velcro from years on display at Planet Hollywood. No specific Bulova reference is documented, so it stands at the brand level.

The record here previously listed it as a Bulova President and cited a Bulova collector's catalog page, which shows the President model existed but says nothing about the film. The auction provenance corrects both: the prop is a facsimile Bulova, model unrecorded.