Meryl Streep wears a Cartier Panthère de Cartier

Katharine Graham had been the owner and publisher of The Washington Post for eight years, since the suicide of her husband Phil, when the Pentagon Papers reached her newsroom. Steven Spielberg's The Post (2017) is the story of her 1971 decision to publish them, against her lawyers, against her board, and against a Nixon administration already in court with The New York Times; the Supreme Court settled it on June 30, 1971, ruling 6 to 3 in the newspapers' favor. Meryl Streep plays Graham, Tom Hanks plays Ben Bradlee, and in the newsroom scenes where the whole staff gathers around one desk to wait for the ruling, a small gold watch sits at the gathered cuff of her blouse: square case, light dial, brick-link gold bracelet.

The Hollywood Reporter put that watch in its roundup of timepieces in that year's Oscar films and noticed what the French site Montres-de-Luxe also caught: it looks like a Panthère de Cartier, and the Panthère did not exist in 1971. Cartier introduced the line in 1983, a dozen years after the film's events. THR matched it to the medium Panthère in 18-karat yellow gold, retailing at $22,800, and stopped just short of certainty, writing only that it "looks like" one. In a film praised for Ann Roth's period wardrobe, the shirtwaists and the caftan, the watch is the one detail that jumped its decade.

Spielberg knew exactly which prop mattered. He gave Streep the watch as a wrap gift, engraved "Oh, Kay!" on the case back. Her review was shorter than any critic's: "I've never had such a wonderful watch."