Marcello Mastroianni wears a Rolex Datejust

Vittorio De Sica, the director of Bicycle Thieves, made A Place for Lovers with six credited screenwriters working from an Italian play, and together they produced one of the most savaged films of the era. Faye Dunaway plays Julia, an American fashion designer who learns she is dying and escapes her clinic to spend the time she has left; Marcello Mastroianni plays Valerio, an engineer who designs safety equipment for race cars at Monza. She arrives through Venice, and the affair settles into a villa in the mountains near Cortina d'Ampezzo. Critics were not kind. Roger Ebert called it "the most godawful piece of pseudo-romantic slop I've ever seen," and a decade later it was enshrined in the book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.

The Rolex Datejust on Valerio's wrist comes with an honest caveat. The only published identification is the French site Montres de Luxe, which names a Datejust on a Jubilee bracelet but prints no frame from the film. The site offers a theory worth keeping in its own terms: this was "very probably the actor's personal watch," because in 1968 paid product placement barely existed. Mastroianni, on that reading, simply wore what he owned. Nobody has published a close-up that would settle the dial or the reference.

What outlived the film was the affair. Mastroianni and Dunaway fell in love during production and stayed together for years afterward, Dunaway wanting marriage and children, Mastroianni declining to divorce his estranged wife, Flora Carabella. Dunaway eventually stopped waiting and ended it, three years on.