Robert Redford wears an unidentified watch

The Way We Were is a love story about two people who should never have been together and know it from the start. Sydney Pollack directed the 1973 film with Robert Redford as Hubbell Gardiner, a handsome, effortlessly talented WASP writer, and Barbra Streisand as Katie Morosky, a Jewish activist who falls for him in college and spends the next two decades trying to make it work. Arthur Laurents wrote the screenplay from his own novel, and the film spans from the late 1930s into the 1950s, through the war and the Hollywood blacklist. Redford plays Hubbell as someone who coasts. He has the talent to be a serious writer but not the will to fight for it, and he lets Hollywood soften him.

In the New York scenes, when Hubbell raises a martini in a black shirt, the watch on his right wrist is a small yellow-gold dress piece with a round gold dial on a flat gold expanding band. It is a costume watch, one of the rare ones in Redford's career: he usually wore his own steel watches on camera, and this is among the period roles where a delicate, ultra-slim gold piece went on instead. After Redford died in 2025, watch blogs began naming it as a Hamilton Reagan. The Reagan is real, a Hamilton introduced in 1938 and sold for three years, gold-filled, with either applied 18K gold numerals or a black enamel numeral dial. It is also rectangular, and it came on a strap. The round, plain-dialed watch on the gold band in the frame is not it. The maker has never been identified.