Dustin Hoffman wears an unidentified watch

In the Washington Post newsroom, Bob Woodward is on the phone working a source while Carl Bernstein hunches over a typewriter a desk away, one hand up at his face, thinking. Dustin Hoffman plays Bernstein, the scrappier half of the reporting team that broke Watergate, a former copy boy who worked the story on shoe leather and persistence. Alan J. Pakula's 1976 film follows him and Robert Redford's Woodward as they pull a single break-in at the Watergate complex all the way up to the resignation of a president.

There is a watch on Bernstein's raised left wrist through that scene and others. It is round, with a light dial on a dark strap, a plain working watch, and that is all the film gives up. The brand never resolves on screen, and no account of the production records what Hoffman wore, so it stays unidentified. The famous wrist in this movie belongs to the other man anyway. Redford wore his own steel Rolex Submariner as Woodward, the same watch he carried through several of his 1970s pictures. Bernstein's is the everyman watch beside it, and decades on it is the one nobody can name.