Sean Connery wears a Gruen Precision 510

By the fifth Bond film, nobody on the production team was paying much attention to what Connery wore on his wrist in dialogue scenes. The Rolex Submariner came out for the action sequences, but in quieter moments, riding in Aki's Toyota through the streets of Tokyo, sitting at a briefing, walking through a hotel lobby, Connery wore his own Gruen Precision 510, a small gold manual-wind dress watch from the late 1950s. Lewis Gilbert directed You Only Live Twice, which sent Bond to Japan, faked his death, and introduced SPECTRE's volcanic lair. The watch was the least interesting thing on screen, which is exactly why Connery got away with wearing his own.

The Gruen Precision 510 is a simple watch: gold-filled case, clean dial, subsidiary seconds at six o'clock, manual-wind movement. Gruen was an American-Swiss firm that had been respected in the 1940s but was declining by the mid-1960s. It was not a prestige brand. It was the kind of watch a working-class Scotsman might have bought in the late 1950s before he became the highest-paid actor in the world, and then kept wearing because he liked it.

Nobody told Connery to stop wearing it, or if they did, he didn't listen. The Gruen is the most authentic thing about Connery's Bond: not a prop, not a placement, not a decision by a costume department. Just an actor's watch that happened to appear in some of the most watched films in history. The watch is barely glimpsed in dialogue scenes, and the Gruen Precision 510 identification comes from Bond-watch historian Dell Deaton's research rather than any production record.