Sam Shepard wears an unidentified watch

Sam Shepard was a playwright before he was a movie star, and you can see the writer's intelligence in how he plays Chuck Yeager in Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff (1983). Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947 and could have been the most famous pilot in America, but he didn't have a college degree, so NASA passed him over for the Mercury program. Shepard plays him as a man who doesn't need their approval. The film cuts between the Mercury Seven becoming celebrities — Ed Harris as John Glenn, Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper, Fred Ward as Gus Grissom — and Yeager at Edwards Air Force Base, still pushing planes faster and higher because that is what he does.

His watch is described as a steel chronograph but has not been identified. The available image is a general production still rather than a close-up. A chronograph is the right tool for a test pilot — timing flight sequences was part of the job — but this was the early 1960s, before NASA standardized its flight watch. Whatever Yeager wore was his own choice.