Paul Newman wears a Waltham Bathyscape

William Goldman wrote Harper (1966) three years before he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the same star. Paul Newman plays Lew Harper, a private detective hired by a rich Lauren Bacall to find her missing husband; Jack Smight directed. In Ross Macdonald's source novel the detective is Lew Archer, and the name changed for two reasons: the producers held the rights to only that one novel, not the Archer series, and Newman wanted another title beginning with H after The Hustler and Hud. Goldman thought Harper fit anyway, a name for a man who harps on things.

The watch is the other Paul Newman watch. On screen Harper wears a steel diver with a round black dial on a black leather strap, sold under the Waltham name but built by Blancpain, one of the red-W Waltham divers Blancpain produced through the 1950s and 1960s; collectors usually call the model the Bathyscape, sometimes the Skin Diver. The identification was settled from the film itself, when researchers froze the frames and found the red W above the Waltham name on the dial. There is a fair chance it was Newman's own, from the years before Joanne Woodward gave him the Rolex Daytona engraved DRIVE CAREFULLY ME, the watch that sold at Phillips in 2017 for 17.75 million dollars, a record, and gave his name to a dial. Dealers now list the humble Waltham diver the same way: the Paul Newman.