Maximilian Schell wears an Omega Speedmaster

Sidney Lumet directed The Deadly Affair, a Cold War spy thriller based on John le Carre's first novel, Call for the Dead. James Mason plays Charles Dobbs, a British intelligence officer investigating the apparent suicide of a Foreign Office clerk. Simone Signoret plays Elsa Fennan, the dead man's wife and a Holocaust survivor. Maximilian Schell plays Dieter Frey, an old friend Dobbs recruited as an agent after the war. The film is quiet and paranoid in the way Lumet's best work tends to be, closer to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold than to James Bond.

Frey wears an early straight-lug Omega Speedmaster, the kind made before the asymmetric-lug "Professional" models arrived, likely a CK 2998 or 105.003-era reference. In 1967 the Speedmaster had not yet been to the moon. NASA had already qualified it for crewed spaceflight in 1965, but it would not become the cultural icon it is now until Apollo 11, two years after this film. On Schell's wrist, it reads as a European professional's watch, functional and well-made without being ostentatious. Lumet does not draw attention to it. You catch it in passing, the way you notice details in le Carre adaptations only on a second viewing.