Steve McQueen wears a Cartier Tank

Thomas Crown robs a bank because he is bored. In Norman Jewison's 1968 film, the Boston millionaire hires four men who never meet him, watches the heist go perfectly, and collects the take from a garbage can. Faye Dunaway's insurance investigator Vicki Anderson comes after him, and Alan Trustman's script turns the chase into a courtship: the chess game they play, lifted from a real match played in Vienna in 1898, was shot largely without dialogue. Jewison borrowed the film's split-screen style from the films of Expo 67, and when Crown takes his yellow glider up, the song running underneath, "The Windmills of Your Mind," went on to win the Academy Award.

The watches were McQueen's own. Quill & Pad puts it directly: "McQueen chose two of his personal watches to wear in the film. One was an elegant Cartier Tank Cintrée, perfect for a businessman, while the other was a Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox, a less formal-looking timepiece for more casual activities." The Cintrée, an elongated version of Louis Cartier's Tank, is the dress half of that pair, and in the office scenes it rides the inside of McQueen's wrist on a black strap, the case slipping under his cuff while he works a cigar. Some write-ups have called it a Tank Américaine, which is impossible: that model arrived in 1989, two decades after the film.

The Cintrée carried one more distinction. For years it "was believed to be the only Cartier timepiece McQueen owned," and the belief held until photographs from the set of Le Mans turned up a second Tank on his wrist. Crown also checks a gold pocket watch in the opening scene, which makes the film three timepieces deep. Two of the three were simply McQueen's own.