Roy Scheider wears a Hamilton Lyndon CLD

Steven Spielberg directed Jaws (1975). Roy Scheider plays Police Chief Martin Brody, a New York cop who moved to Amity Island for a quieter life and got a great white shark instead. Brody is afraid of the water, which is the whole tension of the film: he is the one who has to go out on Quint's boat and face the thing he fears most. Scheider plays him as a man who knows he is in over his head but goes anyway because nobody else will.

Brody wears a gold-filled Hamilton Lyndon CLD, a 34mm dress watch with applied Arabic numerals, its CLD designation marking Hamilton's sealed-case construction of the era. It could not be more different from Matt Hooper's Alsta Nautoscaph dive watch, and that contrast is the point. Hooper is a specialist; Brody is an everyman. The Hamilton is what most Americans actually wore in the mid-1970s, a respectable, unassuming watch from a brand making affordable timepieces since 1892. It is completely wrong for a man who spends the third act on a fishing boat fighting a shark, and that wrongness is exactly right for the character. The realistic everyday watch, not the tool diver, is the outlier in an action film, and it quietly reminds you that Brody belongs behind a desk, not on a sinking boat.