Robin Williams wears a Hamilton American Classic

Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society (1989) is set in 1959 at Welton Academy, a conservative boarding school in Vermont, where Robin Williams plays John Keating, an English teacher who tells his students to think for themselves, stand on their desks, and seize the day. Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke play two of those students, Neil Perry and Todd Anderson. The film earned four Academy Award nominations and won for Best Original Screenplay.

Keating wears a vintage Hamilton, a rectangular gold-filled dress watch with 1940s Art Deco lines that suits a 1959 schoolmaster who quotes Whitman and Thoreau. Hamilton supplied it for the production, and the company now lists it among its on-screen watches as a Boulton; Roland Murphy, who assembled the watch while working in Hamilton's product development in 1988, remembers it instead as a Cabot. Either way it was a period-correct piece, and Williams kept it: the caseback was engraved "Robin Williams Dead Poet Society 1988," and in 2018 it sold at Sotheby's for $32,500.