Marlon Brando wears a Rolex GMT-Master

Marlon Brando wore his Rolex GMT-Master ref. 1675 with the bezel ripped off. Nobody told him to do that. The bezel on a 1675 is the whole point of the watch, a rotating 24-hour ring developed in 1954 for Pan Am pilots tracking two time zones. Remove it and you have a stripped Rolex on the wrist of a man who has stripped away everything else. It works for Colonel Kurtz.

Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), loosely based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, follows Captain Willard up the Nung River to find and kill Kurtz, a decorated Green Beret colonel who has gone rogue in Cambodia. Brando arrived on location in the Philippines overweight and unprepared. He improvised most of his dialogue. The watch was his own, and Phillips auctioned the actual screen-worn piece in December 2019 for $1.95 million, consigned by Brando's daughter; the caseback carried his own hand-engraving, "M. Brando."

In the same film, Martin Sheen's Willard wears a Seiko 6105-8110, the watch a soldier buys at a PX counter. A Rolex on the colonel and a PX Seiko on the captain: the watches sort the two men as cleanly as their ranks do.