Matt Damon wears a Bulova A-10

The Monuments Men, George Clooney's 2014 film, follows a strange unit of the US Army: art experts given infantry commissions and sent into the last year of the war in Europe to find the paintings and sculpture the Nazis had looted and hidden. Matt Damon plays Lieutenant James Granger, a character built on James Rorimer, a real Metropolitan Museum curator who served in the program. When the camera holds on Granger's wrist as he bends over a stack of canvases, what it finds is the watch nearly every American in the film wears: a small field watch with a black dial and white numerals, on an olive fabric strap.

It is the standard-issue American GI watch of the period: hand wound, with a hacking movement, so the seconds hand stops dead when you pull the crown and a whole unit can set their watches to the same instant before an operation. The film keeps the detail honest across the armies. The one British officer in the group, played by Hugh Bonneville, wears a Cyma, the kind issued to Commonwealth forces rather than the American watch. The maker of Granger's own watch is harder to pin down. On screen the dial never resolves sharply enough to read a name, and the one watch-world feature that identifies the cast's watches calls them Bulova while conceding that the same wartime field watch was built by several American firms.