Marlon Brando wears an unidentified watch

1954 was the year Marlon Brando made everyone else look like they were playing pretend. Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor, and Brando's Terry Malloy — the washed-up boxer turned dockworker who decides to testify against his corrupt union — remains the performance people cite when arguing about what screen acting can be. The film was shot on location in Hoboken, New Jersey, in late 1953, and the cold was real. You can see Brando's breath in every outdoor scene.

In this image, Brando holds Eva Marie Saint's Edie Doyle on the waterfront, tugboats and the Manhattan skyline behind them. A watch is faintly visible on his left wrist beneath the sleeve of Terry's plaid jacket. It can't be identified from the black-and-white footage, though Brando personally owned Rolex watches from at least 1943, when his parents gave him a black-dialed Oyster Royalite. Whatever sits on Terry Malloy's wrist, it fits the character — a working man's watch for someone who punches in at the docks every morning and used to punch people for a living.