Steve McQueen wears a Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox

Thomas Crown keeps two watches, and Steve McQueen owned them both. Quill & Pad records that McQueen "chose two of his personal watches to wear in the film": a Cartier Tank Cintrée for the boardroom, and "a Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox, a less formal-looking timepiece for more casual activities." The Memovox is the weekend half of the pair in Norman Jewison's 1968 film about a Boston millionaire who robs banks out of boredom. It turns up when Crown dresses down around Faye Dunaway's Vicki Anderson, one account placing it next to a faded orange beach shirt, and Oracle Time calls it the watch of choice for Crown.

What makes a Memovox a Memovox is the second crown. Jaeger-LeCoultre launched the line in 1950 as its answer to the Vulcain Cricket, which had opened up the field of alarm wristwatches. One crown winds the time and the other winds and sets the alarm from its own power reserve, a rotating disc on the dial marks the chosen hour, and when the moment comes a hammer strikes a gong with a sound collectors compare to a school bell. A single account names Crown's example as a gold reference E855; nobody else has confirmed that far.

The famous chess scene, for all its reputation, was not one of the film's split-screen experiments. Jewison saved those for the opening heist and the polo field and played the chess wordless, in close-up. There is a catch in the surviving frames, too: in the office scenes Crown wears his watch turned to the inside of the wrist on a black strap, case out of sight, so a given frame rarely tells you which of the two watches you are looking at. Oracle Time matched this one to the man it served: "a refined businessman on the outside and scheming mastermind on the inside."