Warren William wears a Paul Vallette

Late in Lady for a Day, with the police still waiting outside, Missouri Martin tells Dave the Dude the bad news, and Warren William's gangster paces the room and checks his wristwatch. Frank Capra cuts to an insert shot, and the watch fills the frame: a rectangular tank-style case on a strap, bold Arabic numerals, a small seconds register, hands at a quarter past eight, and across the upper dial a cursive signature reading Paul Vallette.

The name is one of the period's marketing inventions. Paul Vallette was a trade name registered by a Biel firm in 1919 and again in New York in 1928, and for a stretch it belonged to Ed. Heuer, the Swiss house that later became TAG Heuer. According to Mastering Time, the Heuer company history, it was chic in the 1920s to sell watches in America under French-sounding names, so Heuer and its American distribution partners, the Freund brothers, used the Vallette name for the United States market. Watches signed Paul Vallette still turn up in collections, Art Deco tanks and stopwatches in exactly the style Capra's insert shows.

The film around that insert earned Frank Capra his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director and Columbia Pictures its first for Best Picture. Robert Riskin adapted it from Damon Runyon's 1929 story Madame La Gimp: Apple Annie, an aging street vendor, has a daughter raised in a Spanish convent believing her mother is a society matron, and when the girl sails for New York with her fiance and his father, a count, Dave the Dude, the gambling gangster who patronizes Annie's fruit stand, stages an elaborate charade to keep the secret intact. May Robson took a Best Actress nomination as Annie. Capra thought enough of the story to film it twice; he remade it in 1961 as Pocketful of Miracles and said he preferred the remake.