Ricardo Cortez wears a Hampden

Hollywood filmed The Maltese Falcon first in 1931, ten years before Bogart, with Ricardo Cortez as a slicker, more openly womanizing Sam Spade. Worn & Wound's vintage screen-watch roundup catches Spade checking the time on a Hampden and reasons out what it probably is. Hampden made pocket watches, so the column reads the one on his wrist as "most likely a converted pocket watch," a movement built for a vest and later fitted to a strap.

The name on the dial was, by 1931, already gone. Hampden started in Massachusetts in 1877, moved to Canton, Ohio, under the Dueber case company, and at its peak turned out six hundred watches a day. Pocket watch sales fell after the First World War, and the firm slid into receivership in 1927. In 1930 its entire works, the machinery, the parts, and twenty-one of its watchmakers, were bought by the Soviet trading company Amtorg and shipped to Russia in twenty-eight boxcars to start an industry there. The American Hampden was finished the year before Cortez wore one on screen.