Paul Newman wears an unidentified watch

Chance Wayne comes home a failure and works hard to pass it off as a triumph. In Richard Brooks's 1962 adaptation of Tennessee Williams's play, Paul Newman plays him as a drifting gigolo and washed-up actor who rolls back into his Gulf Coast hometown with a fading movie star, Alexandra Del Lago, on his arm and a head full of comeback plans. Newman had first played Chance on Broadway in 1959, and he carried much of that performance to the screen, though the film softened the play's brutal ending to satisfy the censors. Geraldine Page, who plays Del Lago and appears beside him here, came over from the same stage production.

The watch is harder to place than the man. In the color portrait a slim round dress watch with a pale dial sits on a brown leather strap, thin and formal in the way most watches still were in 1962, before sport models took over the decade. No maker's name is legible in either surviving frame, and no costume study or watch publication has named the brand. It stays a period dress watch, not a named model.