Kirk Douglas wears a Bernex Barracuda

Anthony Mann's The Heroes of Telemark (1965) dramatizes the Norwegian resistance campaign against the Vemork Norsk Hydro plant at Rjukan, where the Germans were producing heavy water for their atomic program. Kirk Douglas plays Dr. Rolf Pedersen, a physics professor written for the film, and Richard Harris plays Knut Straud, modeled on the real saboteur Knut Haukelid. The story folds in the actual operations, Grouse, Freshman, and Gunnerside, and ends with the team sinking a ferry loaded with heavy-water drums in the deepest part of a fjord.

It is a film about timing, and Pedersen's watch earns its screen time honestly. He checks the Bernex Barracuda on a snowy hillside before a raid, checks it again aboard the ferry, and checks it a third time as the deadline closes, while the bomb itself runs on two clocks. When his wife asks why two, he answers that if one fails to go off, the other will. The watch the close-ups reveal is a dive-style piece with a rotating bezel and luminous markers, made by Bernex, a small Swiss brand that real examples and old advertisements confirm but that never built a reputation to match its neighbors.