Escape from New York (1981)

Escape from New York

Escape from New York, directed by John Carpenter from a screenplay he wrote with Nick Castle, was released by AVCO Embassy Pictures in July 1981. Manhattan has become a maximum-security prison, and when Air Force One goes down inside it Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken is given twenty-four hours to extract the President, played by Donald Pleasence, with explosive charges in his neck as the incentive. Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton, and Isaac Hayes fill out the island. (IMDb)

Watches

Rolex Day-Date

Worn by Donald Pleasence as The President. Montres de Luxe identifies the President's watch as a yellow gold Rolex Day-Date on a Jubilee bracelet. (Montres de Luxe) The bracelet is the interesting part of that reading: the Day-Date is so associated with the semi-circular President bracelet that the model's nickname comes from it, but Rolex did offer the reference on a gold Jubilee, and the source describes one. The available frame does not resolve a reference, and the model identification has not been independently corroborated. The costume logic is plain enough: a gold Rolex is the shorthand for the office, and it is the only untouched luxury object in a film that has stripped Manhattan to rubble. A separate Montres de Luxe feature captures the same shackled-wrist moment, the President chained to a wall by his outstretched arms, but calls the watch a yellow-gold Rolex Datejust instead. (Montres de Luxe) The two Montres de Luxe accounts disagree on model, and the wrist is not legible enough in that frame to settle which reading is correct, so both remain recorded rather than one being silently dropped.

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