Peter Vaughan wears a Breitling Top Time

Frank Sinatra hired Sidney J. Furie to direct The Naked Runner (1967) because The Ipcress File had impressed him, and the production became a story in itself: Sinatra walked off the Copenhagen shoot to campaign for Governor Pat Brown in California, refused to come back to Europe, and finished his role on a Los Angeles soundstage with a stand-in, recycled close-ups, and dubbed lines. In the film he plays Sam Laker, a former American spy turned furniture designer in London, whom British intelligence bends into killing a fugitive spy named Frenzel by convincing him his young son's life depends on it; the deed is finally done with a rifle on a disused motorway. Peter Vaughan, decades before Game of Thrones audiences knew him as Maester Aemon, plays Martin Slattery, the wartime colleague who runs the whole manipulation.

The watch on Slattery's wrist has a single published identification: a French listing names it a Breitling Top Time and states that the film gives the watch several close-ups, though it reproduces none of them. No other publication has examined the question. The Top Time itself is solid ground: Breitling launched the line in 1964 as a sporty, accessibly priced chronograph pitched at buyers under thirty, the brand's competition watch for people who would never need a Navitimer's flight math. Whether the close-ups bear out the name awaits someone with the film in front of them.