When Hoffa Went On Cavett

 

 It was 1973, and the height of Watergate (I'm using "height" here, in its current sense, to mean "first act"). He talks about his time inside, and prison reform, and where he was when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and there's some gay panic - which Cavett surprisingly makes a slight apology for towards the end (not that Dick Cavett isn't hip: his "So much for those foreigners" at 39:17 is a typically dry puncturing) – and there's recourse to lie detector transcripts, then a lawyer called Melvin Belli comes on to talk about F. Lee Bailey's latest porn venture, then someone called Charles Ashman who's just published a book about corrupt judges, then they all start talking about "the system", with occasional breaks for messages from the sponsor. And then the credits roll, and they look like this:

 

 

 Like so much Cavett on youtube, it's electric. I sought it out because, as we he head into this third "lockdown" which looks like it's going to last until at least March, I finally today got round to watching all three and a half hours of The Irishman. I'd known very little about James Riddle Hoffa going into it; I didn't know our lifespans had overlapped, and I certainly didn't know he'd done the chat show circuit. But, despite the protests in the description of the Cavett video that "it's an awful movie, anyway" I don't think the former head of the truckers' union comes out of the film that badly, especially when I remember the episode of Ships, Sea & the Stars that detailed how atrocious working conditions currently are for those who work on ships. I really wasn't expecting to be reminded of that. And I thought I might be sick of gangster films, but I'd forgotten they're also secret histories, and everyone in The Irishman talks like Trump. Maybe it's all the Frankenstein movies I've been watching, but I didn't find the digital de-aging of De Niro that distracting either –

 

 It was less distracting than trying to work out where I'd heard the diegetic music, anyway. (Frontier Psychiatrist! That's it!)