Tom Hardy wears an Omega Speedmaster

Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) adapts John le Carre's novel into one of the most exactingly period-accurate spy films ever made, a 1973 London of rust-orange wallpaper, cigarette smoke, and fluorescent dread. The plot is a mole hunt: George Smiley, played by Gary Oldman, is pulled out of forced retirement to find the Soviet agent, codenamed Gerald, buried at the top of British intelligence and run by the spymaster Karla. The thread that pulls it loose is Ricki Tarr, a scalphunter, one of the service's expendable field men, sent to Istanbul to watch a Soviet trade delegate and instead falling for the man's wife, Irina, who offers to trade what she knows about the mole for a way out. Tom Hardy plays Tarr; the mole, when Smiley finds him, is Bill Haydon.

On Tarr's wrist, glimpsed as he smokes through a debrief, is an Omega Speedmaster Professional on a black leather strap. By 1973 the Speedmaster was already the Moonwatch, four years past Apollo 11, a bold steel chronograph that reads modern and a little flashy in a film full of grey men in grey rooms. It suits the character. Tarr is the youngest and least careful figure in the story, the field agent who acts on feeling while his superiors calculate, and the loud, recognizable watch belongs on exactly that kind of man.

In a production this obsessive about getting 1973 right, the watch is one more correct detail rather than a statement. It is never remarked on and never matters to the plot. It is just the right watch, on the right wrist, in the right year, which in a film this careful is its own kind of compliment.