Sammy Davis Jr. wears an unidentified watch

Sammy Davis Jr. spends Salt & Pepper with a glint of gold at his left wrist, and the camera never lets anyone read it. He plays Charles Salt, half of a pair of Soho nightclub owners who blunder into a spy plot beside Peter Lawford's Christopher Pepper. Richard Donner directed it in 1968, a decade before Superman, still working through his years of television and B-pictures, from a script by Michael Pertwee, whose brother Jon would take over Doctor Who two years later.

Off screen Davis collected watches in earnest, favoring Bueche Girod, Cartier, and Rolex, and his own taste tended to walk onto his sets. On the wrist sits a small two-tone watch, a yellow-gold case on a Jubilee-style link bracelet around a round silvered dial, almost certainly his own rather than anything wardrobe handed him. It never turns squarely to the lens. The most detailed write-up of the film's wardrobe wonders whether it might be a Rolex Lady-Datejust, the steel-and-gold Rolesor in a 26mm case, then stops there, because nothing on screen settles it.

What does read on that wrist is the bracelet beside the watch: a gold chain-link ID band engraved S.D.JR. Davis owned several over the years, two later auctioned with B.I.B. and Sammy cut into the plate. The watch a collector would most want named stays unread, and the one thing his wrist spells out clearly is his own initials.