In the age of streaming, there’s a widespread belief that every movie is available, all the time, everywhere. Don’t fall for it! Some of the greatest movies ever made are nowhere to be found due to everything from music rights snafus to corporate negligence. In this column, we take a look at films currently out of print on physical media and unavailable on any streaming platform in an effort to draw attention to them and say to their rights holders, “Release This!”
Michael Dinner is best known now for prestige television — he was a key creative force behind one of the great TV shows of all time, “Justified,” and currently helms “Silo” for Apple TV+ — but 40 years ago, he began his career as the director of a trio of excellent and underrated comedies.
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His debut feature, “Heaven Help Us” (1985), was marketed as a broad teen farce but delivered much more as a rich character study with an exquisite sense of time (the 1960s) and place (an all-boys Catholic school).
Critics excoriated Dinner’s third movie, “Hot to Trot” (1988), at the time. But anchoring the ridiculous premise (Bobcat Goldthwait becomes a successful investment banker by teaming up with a talking horse) was a meticulously orchestrated comic structure populated by a wide array of hilarious supporting actors: Dabney Coleman, SNL’s Tim Kazurinsky and Mary Gross, John Candy as the voice of the horse, etc.
In between his first and third movies, Dinner directed his best film, the mistaken-identity comedy “Off Beat.” Despite a cast that includes Judge Reinhold (in his first leading role coming off “Beverly Hills Cop”), Meg Tilly (post-Oscar-nomination for “Agnes of God”), Joe Mantegna, John Turturro, Harvey Keitel, and a deep bench of recognizable character actors, it has never been released on DVD. As of this writing, the film isn’t available to stream anywhere, either. Its unavailability is a shame, because “Off Beat” is one of the sweetest, funniest movies of its era.
“Off Beat” tells the story of Joe Gower (Reinhold), an unassuming New York City librarian whose best friend is cop Abe Washington (Cleavant Derricks). When Gower inadvertently screws up one of Washington’s busts, Washington tells Joe he can make amends by taking Washington’s place at an audition for a police dance troupe set to perform at an upcoming benefit. Washington’s boss is requiring all his officers to participate, but Washington figures Joe can sign in as him, blow the audition, and they can both go back to their normal lives.
Joe fully intends to fail the audition, but when he locks eyes on female officer Rachel Wareham (Tilly) he decides to stick around. He becomes a member of the police dance troupe and begins dating Rachel, who thinks he actually is a cop — a charade he has to sustain both for the sake of his budding romance and to keep himself and Washington out of trouble.
The comic complications that ensue won’t surprise anyone who’s ever seen a romantic comedy where the protagonist is pretending to be someone they’re not (“The Lady Eve,” “Tootsie,” etc.), but “Off Beat” transcends formula through the sheer excellence of its craft on every level. It begins with the screenplay, written by Tony-winning playwright Mark Medoff (“Children of a Lesser God”).
Medoff uses the framework that his mistaken identity premise provides as a springboard for an abundance of delicately calibrated digressions and relationships. He knows the rom-com formula he’s working with is rock-solid, and thus will hold together no matter how much extra weight he puts on it. While the Reinhold-Tilly romance is charming and fully realized, it’s far from the only compelling storyline in the movie — Medoff crams the film with hilarious sketches, dynamic action, and peripheral relationships that create a vivid tapestry of comedy, romance, and suspense.
It’s all deftly handled by Dinner, whose first smart move comes in the casting. “Off Beat” is stacked with great actors fully capable of carrying their own movies who come in and out here for a few minutes at a time. They add weight and flavor to the central love story in the same way that Charles Coburn or William Demarest would have in the days of Preston Sturges (a director to whom “Off Beat” owes a considerable debt). From Mantegna’s dance-hating policeman and Turturro’s prissy library administrator to the brief but memorable appearances by actors like James Tolkan (the principal in “Back to the Future”), magician Penn Jillette, Fred Gwynne, and others, “Off Beat” is a nonstop parade of delightful comic turns.
And I do mean nonstop. Unlike so many comedies that run out of steam, “Off Beat” keeps introducing new pleasures right up to the end, bringing in Scorsese favorites Harvey Keitel and Victor Argo for a very funny climax involving a bank robbery where one of the cops outside is another Scorsese regular, Mike Starr. In hands less adept than Dinner’s, that bank robbery could have felt like a perfunctory action climax, but he invests it with so much humor and feeling that it feels like an organic extension of the themes and relationships the movie has so carefully established; it expertly brings the varied plot strands together in a way that feels convincing and earned.
Indeed, one of the most surprising aspects of “Off Beat” is how grounded it feels in spite of the absurdity of its premise. This is thanks partly to Medoff’s witty dialogue, partly to a cast that plays every scene with total conviction, and partly to Dinner’s ability to provide a colorful but realistic visual context. Bringing up Scorsese’s name is not inappropriate, as, like Scorsese, Dinner knows how to utilize New York locations to their greatest potential — every background in the film is lively and carefully chosen, and sometimes artfully manipulated.
For a nighttime basketball scene, for example, Dinner had his crew build a court in a parking lot because it provided the perfect angle from which to capture the skyline in the background; the result is a combination of urban naturalism and slightly elevated artifice that gives what could have been a mundane dialogue scene a magical, entrancing quality. And Dinner works similarly throughout the movie to find ways of staging and lighting that take scenes we expect and present them in unexpected ways.
It helps that he’s working with cinematographer Carlo Di Palma, a favorite of both Michelangelo Antonioni and Woody Allen. The visual elegance Di Palma brings to “Off Beat” is stunning, particularly in the scenes delineating Reinhold and Tilly’s relationship. When their have their final conversation in which Reinhold fully comes clean, it’s a moment we’ve seen in other movies, but never the way Di Palma and Dinner present it: with the characters in silhouette surrounded by a blue darkness behind the curtain of their dance recital, a mood of mystery, romance, and anticipation enveloping them.
The whole film is filled with images like that, and with scenes in which Dinner and Medoff figure out how to do multiple things at once. There’s never a car chase just for the sake of a car chase — if a car chase is going to occur, it’s also going to serve as a scene to move a relationship forward, as when Mantegna and Tilly argue about their past while in hot pursuit of a suspect.
This economy makes “Off Beat” feel longer than its 92-minute running time. Not because it drags — to the contrary, it moves like a rocket — but because it provides so many varied satisfactions. Dinner’s filmmaking confidence throughout is astonishing, given this was only his second feature. The ability to find dynamic but motivated camera movements that would serve him so well later on television is already on full display here. The scenes in which Reinhold rollerskates through the aisles at the library, for example, are hypnotic in their rhythms; the camera seduces us without ever calling attention to itself, and at every stage, Dinner and Di Palma find just the right perspective to encourage the audience to fall in love with Reinhold and Tilly as they fall in love with each other.
“Off Beat” was released by the now-defunct Disney offshoot Touchstone Pictures, and after an inexplicably unsuccessful theatrical run and VHS release, it seems to have fallen into obscurity. In recent years, Disney has started to license some of their lesser-known movies to independent labels like Kino Lorber, so maybe a physical media release could be imminent? One certainly hopes so, because “Off Beat” is, as its title promises, an eccentric pleasure that deserves reconsideration.
