Not a spoiler but it may read like one to someone who hasn’t seen Spike Lee’s Inside Man, so beware: A reader has mentioned a curious detail in Inside Man that’s probably nothing, but it bugged him. At the very end as Clive Owen and his colleagues drive off (and keep in mind all the discussions about Christopher Plummer‘s past and dealings with the Nazis and the profits that came from that), they’re driving away in a Volkswagen. [I haven’t verified this, but I know and trust the guy who’s passing this along.] I’ve got a copy of Russell Gewirtz‘s Inside Man script and there’s no mention of anyone driving a Volkswagen, so if this was meant as some kind of extremely dry and subtle joke it was Spike Lee’s (or his production designer’s) idea. It’s not a joke, of course, that Volkswagen AG, the German manufacturer of the first VW’s, got started with slave labor. It began around 1940 by using Polish women between the ages of 14 and 32. By 1944, tens of thousands of Ukrainian, Polish, Danish, Dutch, and Belgian citizens; Soviet, French, and Italian prisoners of war; and Jewish concentration camp prisoners were being used as unpaid slaves at Volkswagen’s plants throughout Europe. At times they totalled 85 percent of Volkswagen’s wartime workforce. Anyway, it’s either a coincidence that Owen and the gang drove off in a VW or it’s not, but of all the cars Lee and his crew could have chosen, it’s odd that they chose a car that’s famous for having been created way back when by Nazis.