Steve McQueen wears a Rolex Speedking

The image everyone keeps from John Sturges' The Great Escape (1963) is Steve McQueen in the cooler, back against the cell wall, baseball glove in hand, and on his right wrist, on an olive military band, a small steel Rolex Speedking with a black dial. His Captain Virgil Hilts is one of three Americans in the camp, a persistent escaper the Germans keep returning to solitary, which is where the nickname The Cooler King comes from. The film is a heavily fictionalized telling of the real 1944 mass breakout from Stalag Luft III, taken from Paul Brickhill's book, and it ends where it began: Hilts back in the cooler, resuming his solo game of catch.

The Speedking is one of the few movie watches with a documentary claim on its part. During the war, German guards routinely confiscated prisoners' watches, and Rolex let captured Allied officers order replacements on credit, payable after the war; the small Speedking was one of the models that reached the camps, and one of the men who escaped in the real breakout is recorded as wearing one. The paper trail runs right into Stalag Luft III itself: an RAF corporal named Clive James Nutting took delivery of a Rolex Oyster 3525 chronograph there on August 4, 1943. Whether McQueen's Speedking was deliberate homage or a lucky accident of the prop department is a question the people who have studied it leave open.

One legend does need trimming. McQueen, an expert rider, did much of the motorcycle chase himself, including stretches dressed as the pursuing German soldiers, but the famous leap over the border fence was performed by his stunt double Bud Ekins, because the insurers would not let McQueen attempt it.