Robert Redford wears an unidentified watch

High over Washington, in an office with the Washington Monument framed in the glass, Alexander Pierce stands in shirtsleeves and a gray waistcoat, his right fist pressed against the window. Pierce is a senior SHIELD official, a member of the World Security Council, and an old comrade of Nick Fury, and he is the film's reveal: the leader of Hydra inside SHIELD, steering Project Insight, three helicarriers linked to spy satellites and built to eliminate threats before they act. Fury shoots him dead at the end.

The Russos set out to make a seventies political thriller disguised as a superhero movie, and the screenwriters worked from Three Days of the Condor as their structural model, so casting Redford was partly an homage to the conspiracy thrillers he led in that decade. Redford said the part interested him because it was different from his usual work, a chance, as he put it, to see cartoon characters brought to life through high technology.

In the window scene a sliver of steel bracelet shows at his right cuff, a few links catching the light, and in this frame the case stays hidden behind his fist. No watch publication or prop forum has put a name on what he is wearing. Redford wore his own Rolex Submariner for decades, on the right wrist, the habit of a left-handed man, and the temptation is to assume Pierce wears it here. Nothing documents that. The watch on Pierce's wrist has never been identified.