Sally Field wears an unidentified watch

Sally Field sits at a cluttered Miami newsroom desk, phone cradled against her shoulder, a small gold watch visible on her left wrist. She plays Megan Carter in Sydney Pollack's Absence of Malice (1981), a reporter who gets fed a false story about Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman) by a federal prosecutor trying to squeeze him. The film is about what happens when a journalist stops asking whether a story is true and starts asking whether it will print.

The watch is a small gold-toned piece on a dark leather strap, appropriate for a working newspaper journalist in 1981. The brand hasn't been identified. It's the kind of functional women's dress watch that was everywhere in the early 1980s, something you'd buy at a department store counter without much thought. Megan Carter is a good reporter who makes a bad call, and her accessories are the least interesting thing about her, which is as it should be.