Robert Rockwell wears a Longines

The Frogmen put the Navy's underwater demolition teams on screen in 1951 with the Navy's own exclusive cooperation, and the watch story the film is remembered for belongs to Hamilton, whose canteen-crown Frogman went on public sale the same year it appeared on the divers' wrists. A quieter claim rides alongside that one. Lt. Bill Doyle, one of the team's officers, is played by Robert Rockwell, and a single anonymous submission to a crowd-sourced movie-watch catalog lists him as wearing a Longines. No model, no frame, no explanation. Just the name.

Nothing else supports it. No watch publication has ever put a Longines in The Frogmen, and the production's documented choice for its divers was the Hamilton, picked, by the brand's own account, because it was what real demolition units wore. None of that rules a Longines out; it means the claim stands alone. A Longines on Lt. Doyle is possible. Nobody has shown more than that.

Rockwell himself is the better-documented story. He enlisted in the Navy during the Second World War and served four years before Hollywood: a real Navy man playing a Navy lieutenant. The year after The Frogmen he appeared as Jor-El, Superman's father, in the first episode of the Superman television series, and he spent the fifties as Mr. Boynton, the biology teacher Eve Arden pined for on Our Miss Brooks, a role he was so identified with that dramatic parts were often denied him afterward. The Frogmen earned two Academy Award nominations, for its black and white photography and for its story, and won neither.