William Daniels wears an unidentified watch

The Parallax View is the middle film in Alan J. Pakula's unofficial paranoia trilogy, after Klute and before All the President's Men. It came out in 1974, between the Watergate break-in and Nixon's resignation, when conspiracy thrillers stopped being speculative and started being accurate. Warren Beatty plays Joseph Frady, a reporter who witnesses a senator's assassination at the Seattle Space Needle and realizes the other witnesses are dying one by one. William Daniels plays Austin Tucker, a political insider who helps Frady while trying to protect himself — the kind of supporting character who exists to deliver exposition and then get removed when his usefulness runs out.

Tucker's watch is described as brass-toned but has not been identified. The available image is a production still of Beatty rather than Daniels. In the 1970s, gold and brass-toned watches were everywhere — Seiko, Timex, and Bulova all made them cheaply — so a brass watch on a Washington insider tells you nothing except that he bought a watch sometime in the previous decade.