Roger Moore wears a Seiko Golden Tuna

Partway through North Sea Hijack, Rufus Excalibur ffolkes holds up a piece of his needlepoint, a tabby cat stitched in wool, against the wall map of the North Sea. Roger Moore plays him against type, a bearded grouch who does embroidery, drinks scotch, keeps cats, and has no use for women, the opposite of the playboy Moore was stuck playing as James Bond. Lloyd's of London has paid ffolkes to plan for the day someone seizes a North Sea oil rig, and the day comes. Hijackers take the supply ship Esther, wire the platform Jennifer and the rig Ruth to blow, and the answer is the plan ffolkes was hired to build: a team of combat divers coming up under the ship.

On his wrist, in a close-up the film stops to give it, is a Seiko 7549-7009, the diver collectors call the Golden Tuna. It is a 600-meter professional diver from 1978, the first quartz watch in the Tuna line Seiko had started in 1975 with a heavy automatic, the first dive watch ever built around a titanium case. The gold is not ordinary plating. Seiko coated the titanium case in titanium nitride, an extremely hard ceramic that happens to come out the color of brass. Over it sits the bolted shroud that gives the watch its name, a thick ring of metal shaped like a tuna can. A clean vintage one now runs well past 2,000 dollars.

The watch suits the film better than most, since ffolkes really is running the job underwater and the Seiko is built for it. The strange part is who wore it next. A year later Roger Moore strapped the same 7549-7009 over the sleeve of a yellow diving suit and went down to a wreck as James Bond in For Your Eyes Only, and by Bond Lifestyle's account it never got a real close-up the whole scene. It took a film where Moore was not Bond to actually look at the thing on his wrist.