Michael Caine wears a Rolex Day-Date

Jack Carter rides the train north to bury his brother and does not believe a word of the official story. In Mike Hodges' feature debut, taken from Ted Lewis's novel Jack's Return Home, Michael Caine plays a London gangster back in Newcastle for the funeral of his brother Frank, dead in what the police called a drunk-driving accident. Hodges and his cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky had both come up through documentary, and it shows: they shot the city as they found it, used local bystanders as extras, and staged the violence with a flatness British crime pictures had not allowed themselves before. The brutalist Trinity Square car park in Gateshead became the film's most recognized location, and outlived it by four decades before coming down in 2010.

Time+Tide identifies the watch as "a Rolex Oyster Day-Date ref. 1803" on a brown leather strap: solid gold case, linen dial, acrylic crystal over a pie-pan dial whose outer edge slopes away, sitting on Carter's wrist "nestling beneath his oversized cufflinks." Watchonista, profiling Caine as a collector, recognizes it as "that personal Rolex Day-Date," the same gold watch Caine had worn in Deadfall three years earlier and the one that would appear on its factory President bracelet opposite Laurence Olivier in Sleuth. The magazine reasons that when The Ipcress File first made Caine rich, he rewarded himself with a raft of luxuries, and one of them must have been this President. Rolex had introduced the Day-Date in 1956 as the first wristwatch to spell the day out in full, and built it only in gold or platinum.

British critics were lukewarm in 1971, and the film outlasted them. The BFI ranked it sixteenth among the century's British films in 1999, and in 2004 Total Film's poll of critics named it the greatest British film of all time. The watch's first film, Deadfall, had flopped. Its second is now called the best one Britain ever made.