Russell Crowe wears a Rolex Submariner

Saigon, January 1968. The Tet Offensive has reached the city, and a war photographer is walking the shot-up streets with a tourist who came to Vietnam carrying beer. The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022) is Peter Farrelly's follow-up to Green Book, built on a true story: in 1967, John "Chickie" Donohue, a Marine Corps veteran turned slacking merchant seaman from Inwood, set out to hand-deliver American beer to his neighborhood friends serving in the war. Zac Efron plays Chickie. Russell Crowe plays Arthur Coates, the photographer who ends up beside him during Tet, shooting the aftermath of the attack on the US Embassy while Chickie watches the war stop being an idea. Bill Murray plays the Colonel. Apple TV+ released it in September 2022.

On Coates's left wrist, turned inward under the camera, sits a steel Rolex Submariner Date on an Oyster bracelet. Montres-de-luxe, the French watch column that identified it, attached a correction in the same breath: this is a contemporary Submariner, what it called a new horological anachronism at the movies, a current model in a story set during the Vietnam War. The Submariner with a date did exist by the very end of the 1960s in the reference 1680, but by the column's read the watch on screen is modern production. A photographer in 1968 could have worn a Submariner. He could not have worn this one.