Michael Caine wears a Rolex Day-Date

The best scene in Deadfall is a robbery scored live. Bryan Forbes cuts between Henry Clarke working a burglary on Majorca and a concert hall where John Barry, the film's composer, appears on screen conducting his own Romance for Guitar and Orchestra with Renata Tarragó at the guitar. Michael Caine plays Clarke, a jewel thief recruited by Fé Moreau and her much older husband Richard, and the film's twist outdoes its burglary: Richard is not only Fé's husband but her father, the child he fathered with the wife of a male lover he had betrayed to the Nazis. Critics filed the picture away as a failed attempt at a Hitchcock thriller, and Caine himself was reportedly disappointed with it.

The watch was in better shape. Watchonista, profiling Caine as an unlikely collector, describes him on this production "looking really rather cool as he wore a pair of shades and a yellow-gold Rolex Oyster Perpetual Day-Date President on a dark leather strap," adding that "the piece here looks to be a second-series ref. 1803 with a fluted bezel" and that Caine's example stands out for its "eye-catching gold linen-textured dial motif." The publicity photographs with Giovanna Ralli show exactly that configuration, a light round dial on a dark leather strap where the factory would have fitted a gold bracelet. Christopher Ward's magazine agrees independently, writing that Caine's "watch-wearing reached its apex in 1968" with this gold Day-Date.

The watch had a longer career than the movie. Watchonista tracks the same personal Day-Date onto Get Carter in 1971, on a brown leather strap, and Sleuth in 1972, by then on its President bracelet, and traces the purchase back to the Ipcress File money: when Caine first hit the big time he rewarded himself with a raft of luxuries, and one of them, the magazine reasons, must have been this President. The film sank, and the watch stayed on his wrist for well over a decade.