Sean Connery wears an unidentified watch

Sean Connery plays Captain John Connor in Rising Sun, Philip Kaufman's 1993 thriller from the Michael Crichton novel, a semi-retired Los Angeles cop fluent in Japanese who is brought in to work a murder inside the downtown tower of a Japanese corporation. He spends the film beside Lieutenant Web Smith, played by Wesley Snipes, reading rooms and people for the signals everyone else misses. In the scene where the two stand together, Smith in a red shirt and Connor in one of his dark Giorgio Armani suits, a round dress watch on a metal bracelet sits on Connor's left wrist.

The watch never quite gives itself up. The dial stays in shadow and out of focus, the case is seen mostly in profile, and the bracelet's polished links throw a warm glint that reads as gold under the scene's lighting and as plain steel under a neutral one. There is no legible brand, no model, no crown to go on. What can honestly be said is small: a round dress watch on a three-link metal bracelet, clearly worn and clearly real, its identity past the reach of the frame.

There is a quiet irony in that. Connery is one of the most watch-famous actors in film history, the wrist that first put a Rolex Submariner on screen as James Bond. None of that fame reaches Rising Sun, where the watch on his arm stays an anonymous blur.