Liam Neeson wears a Hamilton Khaki Field

In a New York alley, Matthew Scudder levels a pistol with both hands, wrapped in a blue scarf against the cold, a watch riding on his wrist below the cuff of a brown corduroy jacket. The watch is a plain field watch: round case, dark dial, brown leather strap. It sits half hidden by the sleeve, and the film never lingers on it.

A Walk Among the Tombstones is Scott Frank's 2014 adaptation of a Lawrence Block novel. Liam Neeson plays Scudder, a former NYPD detective who left the force after a shooting went wrong and now works the city as an unlicensed private investigator, taking cases for cash and sitting through AA meetings in between. Frank set the story in 1999, New York on the edge of the millennium, where a heroin trafficker hires Scudder to find the men who kidnapped and murdered his wife.

The watch reads as a Hamilton Khaki Field, the brand's military-style line: a round steel case, a clean dial, a date window, a leather strap. Hamilton started in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1892, built railroad and then military watches through both World Wars, and now belongs to the Swatch Group, and the Khaki Field is its closest descendant of that army issue. But the identification is community work rather than documented fact. Crowd-sourced watch sites name the model, and a couple even attach a reference number, while no watch publication or brand source has confirmed it and the dial on screen is too small and dark to read a logo off. What the film actually shows is a field watch on a leather strap. The Hamilton name is a reasonable inference, not something the movie confirms.