Leonardo DiCaprio wears an unidentified watch

Frank Abagnale Jr. runs away from home the day his parents tell him they are divorcing and ask him to choose between them. He is still in high school. By the time the FBI catches up with him at a printing press in Montrichard, France, he has passed himself off as a Pan Am pilot, a doctor in a Georgia hospital, and a Louisiana prosecutor. In the hospital scenes of Steven Spielberg's film, Leonardo DiCaprio stands in the corridor in a white coat and gold tie, arms crossed, looking pleased with himself, and on his left wrist sits the watch.

The watch is a plain steel piece on a brown leather strap, the strap swollen with wear, the black dial set with tan hour markers that grow bolder at the even hours. No one has put a brand to it. It is Frank's own watch, the one he has had since high school, and it stays with him through the whole criminal career: posing as a pilot, a doctor, a lawyer, he occasionally swaps in flashier gold watches, then comes back to the steel one.

The one watch the film never gives him is the one a real Pan Am pilot would have worn. Pan American provided its pilots with the Rolex GMT-Master in that era, a watch so tied to the airline that it became an icon. When Frank strides through Miami International in the Pan Am uniform to slip past Carl Hanratty, the camera never offers a full wrist close-up, and whatever is on his wrist, it is certainly not a GMT-Master.