Steve McQueen wears a Gruen Precision

In a Texas prison in 1972, Doc McCoy comes up for parole and the board turns him down. He tells his wife Carol to make a deal with Jack Beynon, a parole board member and corrupt businessman, and the deal gets him out: Doc will plan and pull a bank robbery for Beynon. The job goes the way Doc drew it up until one of the crew kills a security guard, and from there the double-crosses stack up until Doc and Carol are running for the Mexican border with $500,000. What the deal had cost Carol comes out along the way; after a bitter quarrel, they keep driving south together.

McQueen wears exactly one piece of jewelry in the role. BAMF Style, which catalogued the bank-job wardrobe down to the shirts, put it plainly: "His only jewelry is a gold Gruen Precision watch on his right wrist," with a silver dial and a gold bracelet. Doc is a married man, and the whole story turns on that marriage, but he wears no wedding band. The watch gets its own close-up, the gold case and silver sunburst dial with dark rectangular markers stretched across the full width of the frame.

Gruen was a Cincinnati firm, founded in 1894, and it was nearly finished by the time the film came out. The company went out of business in the 1970s, and its records from before 1958 vanished, which leaves its watches hard to date and price. Nothing in the published accounts says whether the Precision on screen was wardrobe stock or McQueen's own.

Walter Hill wrote the screenplay from Jim Thompson's 1958 novel, and Sam Peckinpah directed. McQueen and Ali MacGraw, who plays Carol, began an affair during production; she left her husband, the producer Robert Evans, and became McQueen's second wife. The film earned $36.7 million in the United States, the eighth-highest gross of 1972.