Paul Newman wears a Rolex

Ram Bowen plays trombone in a Paris cellar club and has no plans to go home. Martin Ritt's Paris Blues (1961) pairs Paul Newman with Sidney Poitier as Eddie Cook, an expatriate saxophonist, two American jazzmen in a city that, as the film takes pains to show, treats Black musicians better than their own country does. Two American tourists, Diahann Carroll's Connie and Joanne Woodward's Lillian, threaten to pull them home. Louis Armstrong turns up as Wild Man Moore and actually plays. Duke Ellington wrote the score with Billy Strayhorn, took an Oscar nomination for it, and lost to West Side Story.

Newman wears a small dress watch on his left wrist through the film, a round white dial with plain markers on a black leather strap, visible in the cellar club and in bed beside Woodward. Calling it a Rolex takes a step of faith. The identification began as a suggestion in a men's style article written sixty years later, whose author noted that Newman did not begin wearing his famous Daytona until nearly a decade after this film. The costume analysts repeated the suggestion with the hedges intact: likely steel, probably Rolex. The frames show the white dial and the strap and keep the rest to themselves.