Michael Caine wears a Timex Easy Reader Indiglo

Joe Harding's pension vanishes in the opening act of Going in Style, when the company he gave his working life to is bought out and restructured. Soon after, Williamsburg Savings Bank moves to foreclose on his house, and Joe learns that he, his daughter Rachel, and his granddaughter Brooklyn have less than a month before they lose their home. Michael Caine plays him; Zach Braff directed the 2017 film, a remake of Martin Brest's 1979 comedy. The plot turns on an accident of timing: Joe is standing in the bank when three masked men rob it, and he walks out convinced he could do the same, and reclaim the pension that was taken from him.

On Joe's wrist through all of it is a Timex Easy Reader Indiglo, and the camera catches it clearly: a gold-tone case, a cream dial crowded with oversized black Arabic numerals, a brown leather strap. Easy Reader is Timex's name for that layout, a wide open dial with large clear numbers meant to be read at a glance. Indiglo is the rest of the name. It is the electroluminescent backlight Timex launched in 1992 and soon put across most of its line; press the crown and the whole dial glows blue-green. The word comes from indigo, the color of that light. It is an inexpensive quartz watch, the kind sold off a drugstore rack.

Caine's own watch, worn on screen and off for more than a decade, was a yellow-gold Rolex Day-Date. For Joe Harding the costume department reached for the Timex instead. Gold-tone, not gold.