Steve Martin wears a Rolex Day-Date

In a diner in the fictional town of Rustwater, Kansas, the faith healer Jonas Nightengale holds a gold watch up beside his head and tells the women around him it was a gift from his sainted mother, the year he graduated seminary. Then he drops it into a glass of water. "Just like it was baptized," one of them gasps. In Leap of Faith (1992), Richard Pearce's film about a con-man revivalist working tent shows across the heartland, Steve Martin plays Nightengale, and the watch is a prop in the act.

It is a fully yellow-gold watch, and on screen it is unmistakably a Rolex: a fluted gold bezel, a light champagne dial with the date at three, and the rounded three-piece President bracelet that Rolex reserves for its most expensive models. The brand name is too small to read in the shot, so the exact reference stays open, but the President bracelet points hard at the Day-Date, Rolex's solid-gold flagship.

That is a pointed prop for a fake miracle. The Day-Date arrived in 1956 as the first wristwatch to spell out the day of the week in full, sold only in gold or platinum, and over the decades it became the watch of presidents and power brokers. Later in the film the local sheriff notes that the watch alone looks like about a year's salary. Nightengale takes the most status-coded watch in the world and drops it in a glass of water to sell a miracle.