Steve McQueen wears a Benrus Series 3061

Bullitt was forty-six years old before anyone named its watch. In 2014 the watch site Worn & Wound looked closely at Frank Bullitt's wrist and worked out what was there from three small details: a polished case where the military version was matte, a dial signed BENRUS where the issued dials were blank, and a seconds hand tipped with a red arrow. "Based on those clues," they wrote, "it's easy to believe that this little civilian Benrus is the Bullitt watch." The film never grants a close-up, and while McQueen picked his own wardrobe for the part, whether the watch was his choice is not recorded. The frames back the reading: in the scene with Jacqueline Bisset, fist at his chin, the case catches the light the way parkerized steel never would.

The Series 3061 was Benrus selling its government work to civilians. The company supplied the U.S. military under two specifications, building one-piece parkerized cases with unsigned dials, and it put the same Benrus-signed ETA 2372 hand-wound movement in the commercial watch. In 2014 a good example ran $100 to $500, which made it, as Worn & Wound noted, the attainable McQueen watch in a market where his blue-dial Monaco and Submariner 5512 sit in grail territory.

The film around the watch was McQueen's own production. His company Solar made it, and he chose Peter Yates to direct after seeing the British film Robbery and its extended car chase. Mayor Joseph Alioto closed San Francisco streets for three weeks so Yates could stage the ten-minute pursuit the movie is remembered for, and Bill Hickman, the hitman in the black Charger, did his own driving. The editing won the film its only Academy Award. The anonymous little field watch eventually got its credit too: Benrus sells the 3061 today as its Steve McQueen Bullitt collection.