THE KING AND I

Elvis’s films are sometimes so bad that only the wristwear is worth watching...

In the late Fifties, Elvis Presley made some decent films, like Jailhouse Rock and Love Me Tender. Then he got a taste for spending those royalties and he really started to churn them out non-stop, dozens of films, all involving a leading man with an uncanny ability to diffuse a tense situation through the power of song. The result was what The Guardian calls “26 of the most mesmerisingly awful movies in the history of motion pictures”. The film that is widely considered to have opened the floodgates was 1961’s Blue Hawaii, which sees Elvis leaving the army and swapping his G.I. uniform for skimpy shorts and lots of pre-Benny Hill chasing of swimsuit-clad women around the island. And, of course, lots of singing. Beyond a small hardcore fanbase, the film is unlikely to be considered a cinematic highlight. But one company delighted about it more than half a century later is Hamilton. In the film, Elvis wore an eye-catching little triangular watch called the Ventura, the first commercially successful battery-powered watch.

Luckily for Hamilton, Elvis loved the Ventura and took to wearing it after filming stopped, making it a dream piece of product placement, something the company knows a fair bit about. Hamiltons have appeared in more than 500 films over the years. The cynic might think, “Well, they’re spending all that money to make stars wear them, I bet that pushes the prices up.” No. In fact, Hamilton is one of the best-value watch brands out there. Hamilton’s origins are in 19thcentury Pennsylvania, and it still trades heavily on its American image, but has long been Swiss-owned and benefits from all the watchmaking infrastructure of its Swatch Group parent company. If you want to spend somewhere between a few hundred and a grand or so on a watch, you can’t go wrong with a Hamilton. They do formal watches, pilots’ watches, tough guy army watches, diving watches. And all at prices that should make certain other companies ashamed.