Vincent Arias wears a Rolex GMT-Master

At 12:14 in the afternoon, Oliver runs into a San Francisco street and a car runs over him. Richard Lester then cuts to a full-screen close-up of the boy's wrist on the asphalt, where a Rolex GMT-Master with a red and blue Pepsi bezel reads the time. Oliver is the Mexican boy Petulia Danner and her husband David brought back from Tijuana on a whim; David tired of him and threw him out, and the boy was struck trying to board a bus home. The accident is what ties the film together, because George C. Scott's Archie Bollen, the divorced surgeon Petulia has fixed on, treats the boy without knowing he has anything to do with her.

Petulia (1968) was reportedly the first major studio picture shot entirely on location in San Francisco, and it was the last film Nicolas Roeg photographed before he started directing, full of the fractured cross-cutting he would carry into his own movies. Critics split hard: Roger Ebert admired how desperately unhappy it was, Pauline Kael found it dislikable, and the box office sided with Kael before a cult formed around the film anyway. Watches keep turning up as punctuation. At 6:22 in the morning a doorbell wakes Archie, and he gets out of bed struggling to put his own watch on.

The insert at 12:14 leaves little to argue about. The bezel carries 24-hour numerals in red and blue, the black dial holds round luminous plots and Mercedes hands, a magnifier sits over the date, and a steel bracelet runs into the boy's grey knit cuff. Rolex developed the GMT-Master with Pan American in the mid-1950s so pilots could track a second time zone. No published source ventures a reference number, and the film never explains how a boy from Tijuana comes to wear a pilot's Rolex. The camera only uses it to tell you the time.