juvenalxx

There are many joys in this movie, not least seeing three great actors, Price, Lorre, and Karloff, playing comedy as comedy should be played -- with finesse and wit.

But the most interesting thing for me is that this seems to be the best looking of Corman's Poe films before he went to England to shoot "Masque of the Red Death" and "The Tomb of Ligeia".

The superficial explanation is one that Corman himself offers in his autobiography, where he says that every set from a previous scene was augmented by the budget for the following film: in other words, it was a simple matter of "home improvement".

But there is more than that. Corman seems to have rediscovered his joie de vivre in film-making. The irreverence of this film re- awakened his rebel maverick instincts. He is ending himself up.

"Inside Man" proves that Spike Lee doesn't need controversy to be a superb filmmaker. He takes a tight, twisty, genre screenplay and gives it at once a weight and a lightness that shows him to be a consummate storyteller. He brings an attention to detail, a focus and a knowledge of film convention tinged with both reverence and a sense of humor that he puts into service of the story to great effect. The film reeks of the joy of storytelling.

He has the benefit of an A-List cast -- Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Plummer -- that not for a moment seem to be slumming in a "heist movie". They exude a love of acting without a trace of self indulgence.

The film does lose pace after the release of the hostages, but that is in some ways inescapable, given the plotting (which I don't go into because playing along with the puzzle is one of the joys of the film).

The negative criticism of this movie seems to me to miss the point of what the movie is: a game that draws the viewer in, not through violence, although there is some, but through the threat of violence.

In earlier films, Lee showed his skill at the display of technique; here he proves equally adept at hiding it.

An incredibly stylish and bizarre film noir. The use of art deco as a symbol of cold sterility makes this a wonderful example of visual design as dramatic statement -- murder and intrigue played out against an antiseptic background, contrasted with the more humanistic settings of the pawnshop, the bar where one can find "anything", etc. In addition, one of the most interesting things about this movie is the undercurrent of homosexuality that infuses it. Watch the scene where Laughton confesses the murder to George Macready. His protective reaction goes beyond a sycophant toadying to his powerful employer. And there's the encoded statement where Rita Johnson, referring to the check she has received from Laughton for "music lessons", tells Ray Milland that neither Hagen, Macready's character, nor Janoth, Laughton's character, likes music, thereby tying the two characters together. A fascinating and ingenious circumvention of the Hays code.