Kim Basinger wears a Cartier Santos de Cartier

The watch enters Adrian Lyne's 9½ Weeks (1986) in a red Cartier box, at John's apartment. He tells Elizabeth he bought it for her, and when she asks why he will not just hand it to her, he answers that he likes to watch her move. She opens the box, calls it beautiful, and he tells her that people could once be hypnotized with the sound of ticking. Then comes his question: each day at 12 o'clock, would she look at that watch and think of him touching her. She says yes. He asks whether she will do that for him, and she says yes again, and the film cuts straight from her answer to the gallery where she works and a ringing phone.

The present is a Cartier Santos in yellow gold. Louis Cartier made the first Santos in 1904 for his friend Alberto Santos-Dumont, the aviator, who had asked for a watch that would leave his hands free for the controls, and the piece Santos-Dumont flew with may well be the first pilot's wristwatch in history; nobody else could buy one until 1911. Cartier relaunched the Santos in steel and gold in 1978, and the all-gold watch in the red box belongs to that modern line. The dialogue never names the brand. The box, the gold, and the 12 o'clock instruction are all the film gives you; the identification comes from placement coverage and from the bracelet and bezel visible in the frames.

Elizabeth McGraw is a divorcee who works in a SoHo art gallery, and the watch stays with her after the gift scene. It is on her wrist in a frame where she holds a photograph of John over an open drawer, the flat gold links catching the light, and a black-and-white portrait of Basinger shows the case most clearly, a faceted bezel framing a round dial on the same gold bracelet.