Robert Duvall wears an unidentified watch

In a black and white still from Let's Get Harry, Robert Duvall kneels in the Colombian undergrowth as the mercenary Norman Shrike, a cloth wrapped around his head and a long-barreled pistol raised at something off frame. His fatigue sleeves are shoved up the forearms, and on the inside of his left wrist sits a round watch case, turned so the dial faces the skin. It reads as a dark disc in shadow, and nothing on it can be made out. Wearing a watch dial-inward is field practice, so the crystal will not flash or snag on webbing, which is also why the still gives up no name for it.

Shrike is the professional the amateurs hire when the rescue is already lost. An American engineer named Harry Burck is opening his company's water pipeline in Colombia when rebels seize a visiting American diplomat at the ceremony and carry Harry off with him, a kidnapping run by the drug lord Carlos Ochobar. Harry's brother and a few friends pool what they have and pay Shrike for his military expertise, a local car salesman bankrolling the trip on the condition that he comes along. The clock leaves Shrike no time to do it right. He gives the men only perfunctory training, leads them into the jungle himself, and is killed in a firefight saving one of their lives.

The film around him is itself unsigned. Stuart Rosenberg directed it, then renounced it and let the credit read Alan Smithee, the pseudonym a director takes to disown his own work, and TriStar released it on the 31st of October 1986. Duvall played it straight anyway, down to a soldier's habit of turning the watch in to the wrist, the kind of small true detail a serious actor brings to a job whether or not his director will sign for it.