Pam Grier wears a Movado Museum Classic

In the finale of Jackie Brown, Pam Grier sits down across a table, lights a cigarette, and wears a black single-breasted suit over a white blouse, the outfit her character buys for herself when she decides to outplay everyone in the room. On her left wrist is a small black watch on a slim black strap. You notice the dot before you notice the brand. The dial is black and carries no numerals at all, just a single gold point at twelve and two thin gold hands, which is how you know this is a Movado Museum.

The film was Quentin Tarantino's only adaptation of someone else's material, drawn from Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, and the only time he has handed the lead to a single actor the way he handed it to Grier. Leonard's character was a white flight attendant named Jackie Burke. Tarantino rewrote her as Jackie Brown, a Black flight attendant working a budget airline and smuggling cash for an arms dealer, and he wrote the part for the woman who had been the queen of blaxploitation two decades earlier in Coffy and Foxy Brown. Robert Forster, who plays the bail bondsman Max Cherry opposite her, earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, his first.

The watch itself is a quiet piece of design history. Nathan George Horwitt drew the Museum dial in 1947, stripping away every marker except the lone dot at twelve, which he meant to stand for the sun at high noon. The Museum of Modern Art took the design into its permanent collection, and that is where the "Museum" name comes from. On screen the piece reads as understated but aspirational, the kind of watch a forty-four-year-old flight attendant on a failing carrier might own and still want to be seen wearing across the table while she runs her own play. The costume designer dressed Grier in black PVD-coated steel with gold hands and a gold crown, on a black calfskin strap with matching top-stitching, and let the dot at twelve do the rest.