Preston Foster wears a Mido Multi Centerchrono

Ten in the morning, by the clock on the bank across the street. In Kansas City Confidential, the mastermind the gang knows only as Mr. Big stands at a window and times the routine: at 10:00 he starts the timer on his wristwatch, at 10:01 he stops it, and at 10:02 the armored-car guards walk out beneath the bank clock, right on schedule. Phil Karlson's 1952 noir gives the moment a full-frame insert, and the dial does its own identifying: cursive Mido above the words Multi-Centerchrono, ringed by telemeter and tachymeter scales, round chronograph pushers at the case edge. Preston Foster plays the man holding it, a former policeman building a perfect bank job.

The watch is doing something cleverer than it looks. A normal chronograph of the era wears its stopwatch on its face, sub-registers crowding the dial. The Multi-Centerchrono, which Mido introduced in 1941 and kept as its only chronograph through the forties and fifties, hid all of that in the center: the elapsed minutes ride on a slim red hand tucked beneath the polished central seconds, so that at rest the whole thing passes for a plain three-hander. Collectors now prize the details, the waterproof Borgel case, the big round pushers shared with Patek Philippe's reference 1463, the modest 35 millimeter size, and clean examples ask close to five thousand euros. In 1952 it was a precise instrument that read clearly in a single insert shot, which is exactly what the scene needed.

The film around that insert runs on the same discipline. Mr. Big recruits three criminals who never learn his face, interviewing each one from behind a mask so that none of them can identify him, and the robbery is pinned on an innocent deliveryman, John Payne's Joe Rolfe, who spends the rest of the picture impersonating a gang member to clear his name. The scheme outlived the film: the plot inspired Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.