Rudolph Valentino wears a Cartier Tank

On July 9, 1926, The Son of the Sheik premiered at the Million Dollar Theater in Los Angeles, with Rudolph Valentino in a double role, playing both Ahmed, the young lead, and the aging Sheik who fathered him. George Fitzmaurice directed for United Artists, with Vilma Banky as Yasmin, the dancing girl Ahmed courts and the reason a gang of bandits kidnaps him for ransom. By Cartier's own telling, Valentino loved his Tank so much that he wore it day and night, and he talked his director into letting him keep it on while shooting a Sahara costume picture. The watch is right there in the publicity stills, a small rectangular case on a thin dark strap on his left wrist as he holds Banky.

Then the story turned macabre. Valentino collapsed in mid-August 1926, went through emergency surgery for a perforated ulcer, and died of peritonitis on August 23, at thirty-one. The film went into general release on September 5, nearly two weeks after his death, with funerals in New York and Los Angeles behind it and something close to mass hysteria around them. It took a million dollars worldwide in its first year and eventually more than doubled that. Audiences mourning one of the screen's first male sex symbols were also, without knowing it, watching the Cartier Tank's screen debut.

Cartier dates the Tank's first appearance on screen to this film and calls the result one of the most famous anachronisms in the history of cinema, a Paris dress watch in practically every scene of a desert romance. Nobody paid for the placement. The Tank was Valentino's personal property, and watch writers have compared the effect to Bond wearing an Omega, with the difference that Cartier never spent a penny. Which Tank it was, exactly, no one has established: the references that circulate online are modern models that did not exist in 1926, and the stills show only the rectangular case and the strap. Brand and model line are as far as the photographs can take it.