Steve McQueen wears a Rolex Submariner

Steve McQueen plays Fire Chief Michael O'Halloran in John Guillermin's The Towering Inferno, the 1974 disaster epic about a 138-story skyscraper that catches fire during its dedication gala. The cast was enormous, with Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, and Fred Astaire, and the rivalry between McQueen and Newman was real enough that the two ended up with the same number of lines and equal billing.

The watch is a Rolex Submariner, and it was McQueen's own, not a prop. He wore it on screen here just as he wore it daily, and the watch press has gone back and forth on whether the reference was the 5512 or the near-identical 5513. The Submariner was built as a dive watch, waterproof with a luminous dial, which makes it an odd companion for a fire, a watch designed to survive water rather than flame. O'Halloran spends much of the film on the radio and the telephone directing the evacuation, so it gets a good deal of screen time on his wrist.