Sean Penn wears a Movado Museum

I love it when a watch turns up as an actual plot point, and Oliver Stone's 1997 neo-noir U Turn has a great one. Sean Penn plays Bobby Cooper, busted and bandaged in the Arizona desert, who limps his 1964½ Mustang into the town of Superior with a dead radiator hose and no cash to fix it. When the mechanic - Darrell, played by Billy Bob Thornton - wants money Cooper does not have, Cooper peels the watch off his wrist and holds it up against the white desert sky. It is dark and blank-faced and has no numbers at all, he explains, and that is exactly why it costs a fortune. Darrell shrugs. His own cheap digital, he points out, at least has more features.

Cooper is right, by the way. The watch is a Movado Museum, and the pedigree checks out. Nathan George Horwitt designed that dial in 1947, scrubbing off every numeral and marker and leaving a single gold dot at twelve to stand for the sun at high noon. When did a wristwatch dial first land in an art museum? Not the 1980s, not some recent design moment - 1960, the year the Museum of Modern Art took Horwitt's dial into its permanent collection, the first watch dial it had ever accepted. The thing on Cooper's wrist is, almost literally, a museum piece.

And that is the joke Stone is running. The one object Cooper owns with any genuine taste or value is the one thing worthless to the man across the counter - who would honestly rather have the watch that can tell him what day it is.