Tom Hanks wears a Lord Elgin Jump Hour

Wes Anderson set Asteroid City in a retrofuturistic desert town in 1955, developed the story with Roman Coppola, and premiered the film at Cannes in May 2023. A war photographer named Augie Steenbeck rolls in with his son and three daughters just after his wife's death; the car dies, an alien drops out of the sky to steal the town's meteorite, and the military quarantines everyone inside the Junior Stargazer convention. Tom Hanks plays Stanley Zak, Augie's disapproving father-in-law, summoned to collect his granddaughters and objecting, on arrival, that he is not their chauffeur, he is their grandfather.

Stanley never changes his clothes: a yellow rayon shirt, checked trousers, saddle shoes, an aqua sweater tied at the waist, golf wear from first scene to last. On his wrist BAMF Style identified a Lord Elgin reference 7775: a 31 millimeter case in 14 karat yellow gold whose domed cover hides almost the entire dial, leaving one triangular window through which two revolving discs read out the hour and minute. Elgin sold it as the Direct Read; collectors call the type a jump hour. The American company made these hand-wound, 21 jewel watches through the 1950s and built novelty versions shaped like golf balls.

The frame Anderson built around the story doubles itself, a stage play shot in widescreen color inside a television special shot in black and white Academy ratio, and the period detail holds at every scale, down to a gold watch from the film's exact mid-century moment. The watch's design is usually called retro-futuristic. So is the town. The film took 54 million dollars worldwide against a 25 million dollar budget.