Robert Redford wears an unidentified watch

Robert Redford plays Denys Finch Hatton in Out of Africa, a British big-game hunter and pilot in colonial Kenya who becomes the great love of Danish author Karen Blixen's life. Sydney Pollack directed this 1985 epic, which won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and tells the story of Blixen's years running a coffee plantation in East Africa. Meryl Streep plays Karen, who arrives in Kenya with a marriage of convenience and stays for two decades, losing her farm and her health but finding something more meaningful in the African landscape and in Denys. Redford plays Finch Hatton as a man who refuses to be owned or domesticated, which is both what Karen loves about him and what keeps them from ever truly being together. The film takes its time with the scenery and the silences, and Redford's performance is mostly about what he does not say.

On safari, riding in the expedition car with his hand at his chin, Finch Hatton wears a small round watch with a pale dial on a dark leather strap. It is a trench-style piece, round and legible in the way of the first men's wristwatches of the 1910s and 1920s, an instrument for a hunter and pilot rather than an accessory, and it is period-correct for the years the film depicts. Nobody has put a maker's name on it.