TIME TO SHINE
Product placement is big business in the film world, especially for watch companies
Question what are the two most famous watch scenes in movies and what do they have in common? One is a monologue masterclass from Christopher Walken in Pulp Fiction’s “uncomfortable hunk of metal” scene In a flashback Bruce Willis’s character remembers the day his late father’s war buddy presented him with his “birthright” a gold watch bought by the boy’s great grandfather and passed through the generations surviving several POW camps secreted uncomfortably in a number of different back passages
The other is the scene in Trading Places where Dan Aykroyd’s yuppieturnedpauper tries to sell his expensive watch to a pawnshop owner Despite assurances that it is “singularly unique” and tells time “simultaneously in Monte Carlo Beverly Hills London Paris Rome and Gstaad” a crushed Aykroyd is told “in Philadelphia it’s worth bucks ”
What do they have in common? Firstly they both appear in films that come with the full complement of content warnings If you weren’t around in the Eighties and Nineties be warned these films pushed boundaries then and have now overstepped them considerably The other notable thing is that neither watch had money behind it The Trading Places watch was a fictional “Rochefoucauld” and while sharpeyed viewers have identified the WW trench watch in Pulp Fiction it is from a longdefunct brand called Lancet
This is a long way from the watches you see in movies and on TV these days Watch sponsorship is big business with brands paying handsomely generally for a few fleeting seconds of screen time The biggest player has to be the Americanborn now Swissowned brand Hamilton which has put watches in over movies from Men in Black to Interstellar In fact Hamilton was doing this long before it was fashionable with a history on screen that began with the Marlene Dietrich film Shanghai Express all the way back in
It is hard to watch a film these days without a watch making a little wellpaid cameo And while none of them can quite live up to the impact of the scenes in Pulp Fiction or Trading Places they come with one advantage if you like what you see on screen you can actually go out and buy one for yourself What you do with it after that is up to you If you need money you can sell it or you can keep it to pass on to the next generation hopefully stored somewhere more comfortable than Bruce Willis’s