Roberto Risso wears a Panerai Radiomir

In December 1941, six Italian frogmen rode two-man torpedoes into the harbor at Alexandria and sank two British battleships at anchor. The Valiant restages the raid from inside one of those ships, with Roberto Risso as Emilio Bianchi, the sergeant major who crewed a torpedo alongside Lieutenant Luigi Durand de la Penne. The real attack nearly failed twice. Their torpedo sank, and Bianchi chased it down past the depth limit of his oxygen set, struggled to restart it, and came up close to blacking out. Attaching the charge to HMS Valiant's bilge keels then proved difficult, and it went onto the seabed about fifteen feet below the ship. The two men were found clinging to a mooring buoy, taken aboard the battleship they had just mined, and locked in a compartment near the bottom of the ship. Minutes before the charge went off under the forward turrets, one of the prisoners asked to see the captain and told him the ship was going to blow up.

Perezcope's survey of vintage Rolex-Panerai watches on film identifies what the two leads wear. The site notes that the main characters, played by Ettore Manni and Roberto Risso, can be seen wearing Rolex-Panerai watches, and its film list puts The Valiant under reference 3646. That is the watch the Decima Flottiglia MAS issued to its combat swimmers, a Rolex-built cushion case with a radium dial made to be read in black water. De la Penne's screen watch drew Perezcope's particular attention as a rare straight-lug version of the reference; Bianchi's is identified at the type level, the standard 3646.

Bianchi received the Medaglia d'Oro al Valor Militare for the raid and outlived the film by more than fifty years. He died in August 2015 at 103, the last survivor of the six-man team.