Watching the big screen

It was Rudolph Valentino, heartthrob of the silent movie era, who first conspicuously wore his wristwatch on-screen, in The Sheik which came out in 1921. And his timepiece was, as most of his fans didn't fail to notice, a Cartier.

From this point on, timepieces of distinction have been generally ubiquitous on the big screen - even when they shouldn't have been, such as in the case of the Rolex-wearing Roman centurion in Stanley Kubrick's 1960 Roman Empire epic, Spartacus.

Kubrick's contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, was rather more careful in employing timepieces in his movies, with his 1954 masterpiece Rear Window probably featuring the second-most memorable Hitchcock watch scene.

When the camera zoomed in on James Stewart's handsome stainless-steel Tissot, one knew that we were seconds away from another pivotal twist of the time-space continuum.

In the other great Hitchcock picture of that year, Dial M For Murder, Ray Milland wears an unbranded watch that has stopped, a crucial plot ploy around which all else hinges.

Then, in 1962, a key development in the watches-on-celluloid movement took place, and hardly anybody noticed. Well, with the benefit of hindsight, we can't really blame the viewers or critics of the day, for not even a Rolex Submariner could have competed with the Dr No spectacle of Ursula Andress emerging from the sea in that bikini. But the Rolex stayed on Sean Connery's wrist in the following year's From Russia with Love, and the third Bond film, Goldfinger, in which Agent007's Rolex Submariner is sensuously illuminated in one scene by a cigarette lighter.