Liam Neeson wears a Hamilton Double-Faced (prop)

In Schindler's List, Oskar Schindler hands a watch to his accountant, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), to free a Jewish couple from a forced-labor camp. Schindler (Liam Neeson) is the German industrialist at the center of Steven Spielberg's 1993 film, a Nazi party member and war profiteer who spent his fortune bribing officials through the occupation of Kraków and kept more than a thousand Jewish workers alive in his factories. Bribery is the method, cash and luxuries handed to the right SS officers, and the watch is one more payment.

That watch survives. Julien's Auctions has cataloged it as a double-faced Hamilton, gold-tone bezel and white face, sold with a letter from the film's prop master about its provenance. The catalog hedges itself: it calls the piece "the same or similar to" the watch Schindler gives Stern, which is the auction house declining to swear this is the exact one the camera saw.

None of that reaches the screen: Schindler's List is in black and white, and the gold-tone bezel and white face never read as gold or white. Hamilton, an American company from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has put watches in movies since the 1930s. This is one used to buy a couple's freedom rather than to tell the time.