James Bond first used it to unzip the dress of beautiful Italian secret agent Miss Caruso with the winning line: “Sheer magnetism, darling.”
Later it confused deranged metal-armed henchman Tee Hee, allowing the spy to quip: “Butter hook!” And it saved the bacon of both himself and Dr Kananga’s psychic Solitaire when Bond used it to cut them both down from an almost certain death-by-sharks situation.
The auction house Christie’s can make no such promises. It did, though, announce that it is to sell one of the spy’s most famous and useful watches — his Rolex Submariner from the 1973 film Live and Let Die.
The watch is likely to be expensive even by Rolex standards, and before its sale in Geneva on November 14 an estimate has been placed on it of 200 000 to 400 000 Swiss francs.
But this is more than a watch. It is a gadget designed by Q that has both a hyper-intensified magnetic field –for unzipping dresses and dodging bullets — and a buzz saw.
In reality it was created by production designer Syd Cain, who worked on four Bond movies as well as films such as Ken Russell’s Billion Dollar Brain and Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy.
As well as the watch, movie fans also have Cain to thank for Rosa Klebb’s spiked shoe in From Russia with Love and Bond’s extraordinarily complicated briefcase (“Now, watch very carefully”) .
Time is money
Christie’s watch specialist Aurel Bacs said there were many famous Rolexes — the one Marilyn Monroe supposedly gave to JFK, for example, or the GMT Master worn by Che Guevara — but “as identifiable as these iconic pieces are, there is one that stands above and beyond the rest and stimulates great excitement”.
He called it “probably one of the most recognisable and famous watches on the planet”.
The sale on the shores of Lake Geneva will see 425 watches being auctioned. Though one of the standouts, the Bond Rolex is not likely to be the most expensive. That record may well go to a rare Patek Philippe platinum wristwatch from 1946, which has a pre-sale estimate of £700 000 to £1-million. —