Serge Reggiani wears a Rolex Air-King

François Nolan has been away ten years, seven of them in prison and three banished to the Camargue, and he comes back to Paris with one piece of unfinished business: someone sold him out a decade ago. In Roger Pigaut's Comptes à rebours, shot around Paris in the autumn of 1970, Nolan finds his old mistress Madeleine, played by Jeanne Moreau, married to his friend Doctor Saint-Rose, and a disfigured policeman waiting with a vengeance of his own. The robbery that put him away also killed his brother. French critics shrugged at the plot, a routine settling of underworld scores, and admired the room instead: Reggiani, Moreau, Simone Signoret, Michel Bouquet, Marcel Bozzuffi, Jean Desailly and Charles Vanel, with a Georges Delerue score underneath.

The Air-King is the French site Montres de Luxe's identification, made without a frame from the film, and nobody else has published a word about Nolan's wrist; in the black-tie publicity still, every cuff stays down. The model itself is the plainest Rolex of its era, a 34mm time-only watch from the Air line the company introduced in 1945 in honor of RAF pilots, and the one survivor of the four Air models.

The richest history on the set ran between two of its actors. Five years before this film, Simone Signoret was among the friends, with Yves Montand and later the singer Barbara, who talked Reggiani into singing professionally at the age of forty-three, and the chanson career that followed gave France "Les loups sont entrés dans Paris" and "Sarah." On screen she plays Léa to his Nolan. Off screen she had already changed the direction of his life once.