Sean Connery wears a Gruen Precision 510

Everyone remembers the Rolex Submariner from Connery's Bond films. Fewer people notice the Gruen Precision 510, a small gold manual-wind dress watch that was almost certainly Connery's own. It appears in Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, and Diamonds Are Forever, always in the quieter scenes where Bond isn't shooting or swimming. Goldfinger is no different. The Gruen handles the indoor work while the Submariner takes the action sequences.

The Precision 510 is a modest watch by any standard. Gruen was a Cincinnati-based company founded by a German immigrant, Dietrich Gruen, and by the 1960s it was mid-range at best, nowhere near the prestige of Rolex or Omega. That Connery wore his own inexpensive dress watch alongside the Submariner on what was already the most famous spy franchise in cinema says something about how film wardrobes worked in the early 1960s. Nobody was coordinating product placement. Nobody was thinking about what watch bloggers would say fifty years later. Connery had a watch. He wore it.

The Gruen shows up across six Bond films, as persistent on screen as the Submariner itself. It is the anti-Bond watch, plain and functional where everything else about 007 is calculated to impress, and that's exactly why it's worth tracking.