Mark Wahlberg wears a Rolex Submariner

A half circle of robed men sits on one side of a low brass coffee table, Mark Wahlberg on the other, in a desert pavilion. The camera finds the watch on Wahlberg's wrist, mostly hidden under the cuff of his seersucker suit: a steel Rolex on an Oyster bracelet. Wahlberg plays Fletcher Chace, the Getty Oil negotiator and former CIA man whom oil tycoon J. Paul Getty sends to handle the 1973 kidnapping of his sixteen-year-old grandson in Rome.

The watch is a Rolex Submariner, reference 1680. Rolex introduced it in the late 1960s as the first Submariner with a date, a cyclops lens over the window, on a 40mm steel case rated to 200 meters, and kept it in the catalog until about 1980. That puts it correct to the year on the wrist of a man working in 1973. It is also not a prop. By the account of London dealer Daniel Somlo, who supplies vintage pieces to Ridley Scott's productions, the 1680 here is his own, lent to the film.

So a 200-meter diver's Rolex turns up at a desert tea table, its deep-water seal useless, the rest of it doing nothing more than telling a fixer the time. The film around it runs on plainer arithmetic. The ransom is talked down to four million dollars, and Getty, the richest private citizen alive, pays one of it, the most his lawyers can claim against tax.