Robert Shaw wears an unidentified watch

The pre-title sequence of From Russia with Love (1963) is a rehearsal for a murder. SPECTRE's assassin Donald "Red" Grant stalks a man in a James Bond disguise through a training exercise and strangles him with a wire drawn from his wristwatch. The watch is the weapon: a heavy steel piece on a dark leather strap, with a retractable garrotte wire that pays out from the case. Garrottes were a silent killing tool of the Second World War, and the watch may be a quiet nod to the wire devices of that era.

Grant gets his chance at the real Bond aboard the Orient Express. He kills Captain Nash, the British agent sent to meet Bond, and takes his identity. Bond tricks him into setting off the booby trap in Nash's attache case, and in the fight that follows Grant gets the wire around Bond's neck before Bond reaches a knife from the same case, stabs him, and finishes him with the garrotte from Grant's own watch. When Christian Marclay assembled his 24-hour film montage The Clock, this fight went in at 4:54 in the morning.

Which watch the prop department started from has never been settled. One published reading makes it a Milan with a white dial, gold markers at the quarter hours, and a date window at three; another sees a First World War style trench watch with wire lugs and a plain bezel. The frames are too dark to decide. In the clearest of them, Grant grins as he draws the wire taut from a pale dial on a steel case, and no brand is visible. The idea outlived the film: a scene cut from A View to a Kill (1985) gave Bond a garrotte watch of his own, this one built on a Seiko diver.