Robert De Niro wears a Seiko Day-Date

Frank Raftis lives by the timetable. In Ulu Grosbard's Falling in Love, Robert De Niro plays a Manhattan architect who commutes in from Westchester, and the film follows what happens when his routine starts intersecting with someone else's. He and Molly Gilmore, played by Meryl Streep, first collide while Christmas shopping, swapping bags by accident at a bookstore, and then keep finding each other on the Metro-North train. Both are married. Neither went looking for any of it. It is one of De Niro's most restrained performances, a quiet domestic drama in a decade he spent mostly playing harder men.

The film gives the watch an unusually good look. In one close shot it fills the frame: a steel watch with a black dial, a day and date window at three o'clock, applied baton markers, and a faceted steel bracelet. Everything about it, from the dual day-date aperture to the cut of the bracelet links, reads as a Seiko from the late 1970s or early 1980s, the kind of dependable everyday watch the company sold in enormous numbers. No publication or prop record has ever identified it, so the attribution to Seiko rests on the design alone: the dual day-date layout, the faceted bezel, and the bracelet that the brand used across its everyday range in those years.