Anne Hathaway wears a Rolex Lady-Datejust

For the first third of The Last Thing He Wanted, before Elena McMahon walks off the campaign trail and into an arms deal, she is a Washington political reporter, and on her wrist is a Rolex Lady-Datejust in gold and steel. The French watch magazine Montres de Luxe caught it in that early newsroom stretch, where the watch is plainly on screen, and thought it well chosen. The two-tone Lady-Datejust, the editors wrote, was the luxury watch for women in the 1980s, which is the decade Dee Rees was reconstructing in her adaptation of Joan Didion's 1996 novel.

Rolex had introduced the Lady-Datejust in 1957, a smaller version of the men's watch built to the same standard, and by the mid-1980s a gold-and-steel one was about as conventional a luxury choice as a working woman could make. Elena wears it while she still has a newsroom and a byline. The same magazine pointed out that the Rolex only lasts the first third: once she is in the field, running guns to the Central American contras in her dying father's place, it is replaced by a watch nobody has been able to identify.