Tony Curtis wears an unidentified watch

Tony Curtis wanted to be taken seriously, and Sidney Falco is where it started. In Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Curtis plays a Times Square press agent who will ruin anyone's life for a mention in J.J. Hunsecker's newspaper column. Burt Lancaster plays Hunsecker, a thinly veiled version of Walter Winchell, and the two circle each other through nighttime Manhattan in James Wong Howe's black-and-white photography, which makes Broadway look like a place where nothing good happens after dark. Falco is desperate, manipulative, and completely aware of how low he is willing to go. Curtis had been a matinee idol up to this point. Playing Falco was his way of saying he could do more than smile.

The featured image is a promotional still, and a round watch is noted in the records but not clearly visible. Whatever Falco wears, it would be something a man on the hustle could afford — not expensive enough to seem successful, not cheap enough to get him turned away at the door. Falco lives in the gap between who he is and who he wants people to think he is, and the watch would sit right there with him.