Rudolph Valentino wears a Cartier Tank

At a desert location in 1921, between scenes on The Sheik, a still photographer caught Rudolph Valentino in full costume as Ahmed Ben Hassan, cigarette in one hand and a small rectangular watch on a dark strap on his left wrist. The archive caption spells out what the camera recorded: Valentino in character, smoking, and showing his Cartier watch during the filming of George Melford's adaptation of Edith Maude Hull's bestselling 1919 novel. The watch was his own Tank, and he was known for refusing to take it off, even for a role set in a world with no wristwatches in it.

The Tank in that photograph was close to brand new. Louis Cartier came back from his war service in 1917 with the idea, a case built on the rectangular silhouette of a military tank seen from above, and presented the prototype to General Pershing of the American Expeditionary Force before the first examples went on sale. Through 1919 and 1920, Cartier sold six of them. So the watch in the picture was a rarity that almost nobody owned, on the wrist of a man whose film, made for under two hundred thousand dollars, would pass a million dollars in ticket sales within a year and fix his image as one of the screen's first male sex symbols.

Cartier itself dates the Tank's first appearance on screen to the 1926 sequel, which implies the watch never made it into the finished 1921 picture, or at least that nobody has pointed to a frame where it shows. What survives from The Sheik is the working photograph from the set: the star in costume, holding his own watch up for the camera, with Paramount's name on the print. For 1921, that photograph is the documentation.