Vince Edwards wears a Bulova Wrist Alarm

Claude approaches murder the way an actuary approaches risk: methodically, unsentimentally, for a fixed fee. He exercises, watches what he eats, keeps a routine, and refuses to touch a gun, telling his minders that guns are illegal and he never uses anything illegal; what he orders instead is a hunting rifle with a tripod and telescopic sight. Vince Edwards plays him in Murder by Contract (1958), which Irving Lerner shot in Los Angeles in seven days in February 1958 on a shoestring, with Lucien Ballard behind the camera, and Phillip Pine and Herschel Bernardi as Marc and George, the mobbed-up minders Claude irritates by treating the job like a vacation. Martin Scorsese has cited it as the film that influenced his approach to filmmaking more than any other, and he dedicated New York, New York to Lerner's memory.

The watch gets its close-up in the sniper's nest. Waiting outside the target's home, Claude checks the time, and the frame fills with a Bulova Wrist Alarm, the brand and the model written right on the dial. It is an alarm watch: a second crown at the four o'clock position controls a red-arrowed alarm hand, pulled out to arm it and pushed in to silence it, with the ordinary time-setting crown above at two. Collectors call the two-toned dial design the bull's eye, a name that fits the scene. The costuming is not even consistent about it; in wider shots the watch rides an edge-stitched dark leather band, and in the close-up it wears a metal-framed expansion band. Bulova had been making watches in New York since 1875.