Paul Newman wears a Rolex Submariner

Paul Newman plays Rheinhardt in Stuart Rosenberg's WUSA, a cynical drifter who washes up in New Orleans and takes a job as an announcer at a right-wing radio station. Joanne Woodward plays his girlfriend Geraldine, and Anthony Perkins is Rainey, a troubled idealist who discovers the station's darker purpose. The film was adapted from Robert Stone's novel A Hall of Mirrors, and it sits in that late-1960s space where American filmmakers were trying to process the country's political fractures in real time.

Newman wears a Rolex Submariner, which by 1970 had become something of a personal signature. The Submariner on Rheinhardt reads differently than it would on a diver or a soldier. This is a man who's talented enough to be on the radio but too disillusioned to care what he's saying into the microphone. He doesn't believe in the station's politics, doesn't believe in anything much, and the Rolex on his wrist looks like something acquired in a better time, before he gave up on taking himself seriously. It's the one quality object a man in decline hasn't bothered to pawn yet.