Steve McQueen wears a Hanhart 417

Buzz Rickson flies a B-17 the way other men pick fights. Philip Leacock's The War Lover (1962), from Howard Koch's adaptation of the John Hersey novel, gives Steve McQueen a bomber captain driven, as the French press put it, by a death drive. Robert Wagner is the steadier co-pilot, Shirley Anne Field the woman between them, and a young Michael Crawford turns up in the crew. The production flew real B-17 Flying Fortresses out of actual RAF bases.

The watch on his wrist was not the studio's. McQueen owned a Hanhart 417, the German pilot's chronograph, in its rare stainless steel form, the 417 ES, one of perhaps five hundred made, and the watch press records him wearing it in this film and everywhere else: interviews, photo shoots, motorcycle races, the LIFE magazine sessions of 1963. In the film he wears it dial side in, on a broad leather strap. It is also, strictly speaking, the wrong watch twice. Hanhart had built chronographs for German pilots since the late 1930s, but the 417 arrived around 1954 as the new Bundeswehr's pilot chronograph, which puts a West German service watch of the wrong decade on an American captain flying out of England in 1943. The model's signature is the red pusher, colored as a warning so a pilot would not reset his timing mid-flight.