Robert De Niro wears a Rolex Sea-Dweller

In the mountains above Clairton, Pennsylvania, Michael Vronsky has a rule about hunting: a deer is taken with one shot, or it is not taken at all. Robert De Niro plays him in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter as a steelworker who believes in that kind of control, then enlists, goes to Vietnam, and comes home unable to say what happened to him there.

On the inside of his left wrist, worn the way soldiers wore them to cut the glare, Michael keeps a steel Rolex on an Oyster bracelet. It is often called a Submariner, and the two are near twins, but the watch publications that looked closely disagree. Oracle of Time reads it as a Rolex Sea-Dweller, reference 1665, and Time and Tide agrees, pointing to the date at three o'clock that a no-date Submariner does not have. The Sea-Dweller was the Submariner's deeper sibling, built for saturation divers and rated to 610 meters.

Time and Tide points out that the watch is easiest to see near the end, in the scene where Michael goes back to Saigon to find Nick and tries to talk him into coming home. He wears it before he ships out, in the deer woods, and he is still wearing it then.