10 Films to Watch If You Like Gosford Park

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Robert Altman's Gosford Park. Widely considered to be the American auteur's last masterpiece, this country house whodunit not only put a revisionist spin on the heritage picture, but it also combined biting social critique with human drama and subversive humour. Moreover, it boasted an exceptional array of British acting talent. So, what else should you be watching if you enjoyed this object lesson in breaking the rules of the game?

As Cinema Paradiso noted in The Instant Expert's Guide to Robert Altman, the director of M*A*S*H (1970), Nashville (1975), The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993) could be an unpredictable maverick. On form, he was a devastatingly acerbic critic of both society and the Hollywood genre system, while his style was so distinctive that the term 'Altmanesque' was coined to describe films with large ensembles, whose overlapping dialogue was complemented by nimble camera moves that gave the viewer choices about where to focus their attention on the screen.

During the course of his long career, however, Altman was prone to going off the boil. Given that he had undergone heart transplant surgery in 1995, it was remarkable that he was still able to work at all. But he entered negotiations about a collaboration with actor-producer Bob Balaban after receiving decidedly mixed reviews and box-office returns for Prêt-à-Porter (1994), Kansas City (1996), The Gingerbread Man (1998), Cookie's Fortune (1999) and Dr T & the Women (2000). No one dared suggest that Altman was washed up, but the 76 year-old knew he needed a hit.

Who Cares Whodunit

Robert Altman had every reason to be grateful to the maid who had worked in his family's Kansas City home in the 1930s, as she had instilled his lifelong love of jazz. But he also retained an unease about 'non-people' living in 'non-spaces', as they so dedicated themselves to catering to their employers' every whim that they almost had no lives of their own.

This notion was still preying on Altman's mind, when Bob Balaban approached him in 1999 with a proposal to develop a film together. Altman suggested a murder mystery and they agreed to set it in an English country house in 1932 so that they could deconstruct the conventions of the heritage film.

Impressed by the insights into the coexistence of two separate communities within a single household that Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh had demonstrated in creating Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75), Altman and Balaban commissioned a screenplay. The director was disappointed by the 'sentimental' nature of their scenario, however, as he wanted something approaching a cross between Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (1939) and George Pollock's adaptation of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians (1965).

As writers like Tom Stoppard and Christopher Hampton were unavailable, Balaban suggested Julian Fellowes, a jobbing British actor with whom he had recently attempted to develop an adaptation of Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds. Briefing him that he wished to avoid the kind of period refinement that director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant had favoured in making A Room With a View (1985) and Howards End (1992), Altman stressed to Fellowes the importance of showing what united and divided those in the drawing room and in the servants' hall.

He was keen to highlight that the two classes were as different as the Americans and the Iraqis, yet they shared the same house. Key to this was the fact that the haves were almost incapable of functioning without the have-nots, who prided themselves on effacing their identity and suppressing any desire for an autonomous existence in order to serve and live vicariously through their supposed betters. Moreover, Altman was keen to show that that the staff had become so inured by their subservience that they had imposed rigid hierarchies of their own, with the butler, the housekeeper and the cook ruling their respective roosts.

As he had never written a feature script before, Fellowes later joked about his initial phone conversation with Altman, 'All the way through I thought this can't be happening - a 50 year-old fat balding actor is phoned up by an American movie director.' He was also aware that he and Altman came from very different backgrounds and would approach the material from contrasting perspectives. 'Altman and I were never a natural pair,' he told one interviewer. 'He was a creature of the Sixties, you know, dope and freedom and let it all hang out. Nonetheless, in certain areas, we were very similar. He also believed in character narrative. All his films are character narratives. The plot is often quite subsidiary.'

Indeed, Altman was so fixed on his themes and characters that he joked that the Agatha Christie element was almost a red herring. Less a whodunit than 'a who cares whodunit'. Amusingly, he cited Eugene Forde's Charlie Chan in London (1934) as an example of a situation in which all the suspects were gathered under the same roof and Fellowes wove the fictional genesis of that film into his scenario so that Altman could also present a guest's perspective of the dysfunctional upstairs, downstairs relationship.

Fellowes took his inspiration from the murder of George Whiteley, the multi-millionaire owner of a celebrated London department store, who had been shot by his illegitimate son, Horace George Raynor, in January 1907. While also drawing on the inimitable class observations of P.G. Wodehouse, Fellowes also turned to Isobel Colegate's 1980 novel, The Shooting Party, which had been filmed with an all-star cast by Alan Bridges in 1985.

This undervalued feature contains echoes of La Règle du Jeu/The Rules of the Gam, which Renoir had used to show 'that for every game, there are rules. If you don't play accordingly, you lose.' While promoting Gosford Park, Altman liked to claim, 'I learned the rules of the game from The Rules of the Game.' But these were more complicated than they appeared on the surface.

A Land Fit For Heroes

As Evelyn Waugh revealed in Brideshead Revisited - which was adapted for television by Charles Sturridge in 1981 and for cinema by Julian Jarrold in 2008 - the Bright Young Things of the Jazz Age had celebrated avoiding becoming part of the 'lost generation' by living life to the full. Hailing from the landed gentry, the three sisters at the heart of Gosford Park would have revelled in this decadent decade before doing their duty to their impecunious family by finding husbands who could not only keep them in the style to which they had become accustomed, but who could also uphold the status and traditions of their class.

But the 1920s also took a heavy toll on a land that was supposedly going to be fit for heroes. Successive governments had been riddled with corruption and incompetence. Consequently, the Britain of 1932 was clinging to a past of rapidly fading glories. The social system had buckled following the senseless slaughter of the Great War, which had claimed over a million lives across the empire. Moreover, the aura of imperial invincibility had waned, while the rise of the Labour Party had undermined the sense of deference that had kept the lower classes in thrall to the ennobled and ruling elites.

Many great country houses remained open, but the majority of their owners were broke and several had entered marital alliances of convenience in order to stay afloat. The onset of the Great Depression widened the gulfs between the aristocracy, bourgeoisie and proletariat and it's this moment in time that Altman chose to expose the faultlines in a country that still professed to rule the waves and demand the obeisance of the rest of the world.

A Little Bit of Plot

Proof that the trappings of industrial capitalism can't buy gentility and honour, Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) wasn't born into the upper echelons. But he used the wealth accrued from his factories at Isleworth and Twickenham to purchase status, as well as a degree of immunity from the exploitation of his workforce and his habitual abuse of the young women on his payroll, whose children were taken away at birth and deposited in a London orphanage after he had faithfully promised to find them good homes.

Naturally, these truths had not emerged when Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas) cut cards with sister Louisa (Geraldine Somerville) to see who would marry McCordle and both keep Gosford Park in the family and provide their elderly aunt, Constance, Countess of Trentham (Maggie Smith), with a stipend. As a consolation prize, Louisa became affianced to Lord Stockbridge (Charles Dance), while third sister, Lavinia (Natasha Wightman), became indebted to her brother-in-law when he bankrolled a business scheme proposed by her military husband, Anthony Meredith (Tom Holland).

As the weekend shooting party assembles, Meredith is hoping to pitch a new idea to supply boots to Sudanese soldiers. The Honourable Freddie Nesbitt (James Wilby) is also keen to bend McCordle's ear because he needs a job after discovering that his glove heiress wife, Mabel (Claudie Blakely), isn't as wealthy as he had been led to believe. Consequently, he threatens to expose the fact that Isobel McCordle (Camilla Rutherford) has aborted his baby unless she persuades her father to find him work.

Such convolutions only cover the hosts and their guests, who also include McCordle's entertainer cousin Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam), who has invited along Hollywood producer Morris Weissman (Bob Balaban), who is hoping to do some background research for his next project, Charlie Chan in London. Below stairs, there is a small army of staff under the command of Jennings the butler (Alan Bates), Mrs Wilson the housekeeper (Helen Mirren) and Mrs Croft the cook (Eileen Atkins).

Each is harbouring a private pain, although nothing seems to concern footmen George (Richard E. Grant) and Arthur (Jeremy Smith) or kitchen maid Bertha (Teresa Churcher), who cheerfully slopes off to quiet corners with her various men friends. Head housemaid Elsie (Emily Watson) is more cautious about her dalliance with Sir William, which comes as a shock to Lady Constance's new Scottish maid, Mary Maceachran (Kelly Macdonald), who is welcomed more readily than compatriot Henry Denton (Ryan Philippe), Weissman's valet (and secret lover), who has been billeted with Stockbridge's man, Robert Parks (Clive Owen).

Such are the rules of the house that visiting servants assume the surnames of their employers in order to keep things simple. But nothing is quite as it seems at Gosford Park, as Inspector Thompson (Stephen Fry) and Constable Dexter (Ron Webster) discover when they are summoned after Sir William's corpse is discovered in his study after Elsie had spoken up while serving at table to defend him from Lady Sylvia's stinging criticism. While the far from grieving widow consoles herself with Denton (who is about to be exposed as an actor posing as a servant to prepare for a role), the inquisitive Mary does a little sleuthing of her own and discovers a prior connection between the deceased and two members of his staff.

Below the Surface

From the moment he takes a cue from Renoir and uses a downpour to define the class divide, it's clear that Altman, an avowed anti-authoritarian outsider, has a handle on 1930s British society. The upper bracket is presented as being insular, pompous and hostile to change, as it barricades itself into Gosford Park and expects to be waited on hand and foot. Lady Constance insists on Mary getting out of the car in the rain to open her thermos flask and keeps her standing while she looks down her nose at Novello and Weissman in a passing vehicle. But she's not alone, as Mary is ordered by one of her own kind to take her employer's luggage to the servants' entrance rather than follow her through the front door.

Altman delights in exposing the out-modishness of the etiquette that Lady Constance and her ilk trust will provide a fragile defence against the onrush of modernity. For all their airs and graces, however, the toffs are financially and morally bankrupt hypocrites who think nothing of selling themselves for money, committing adultery, sexually harassing the staff and casually making racist, homophobic and classist remarks (and in front of the servants, too!)

Despite Weissman being Jewish, Fellowes and Altman play down the anti-Semitism that existed among the British upper classes between the wars. This had already been discussed to potent effect in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's script for Merchant-Ivory's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning novel, The Remains of the Day (1993).

Yet, it doesn't seem to bother Weissman that Charlie Chan would be played by Sidney Toler, a European-American who used yellowface make-up in all 22 of his outings as Earl Derr Biggars's Hawaiian sleuth. And there's further irony in the fact that an American satire on the predatory nature of the English gentry should have been made at the very time when Hollywood producers were boorishly imposing themselves upon female stars and staff members with a similarly toxic sense of entitlement that was eventually exposed by the #MeToo Movement.

Following Renoir's example, Altman and Fellowes reveal the aristocrats to be blood-sport enthusiasts, although the pheasant shoot at Gosford is markedly less grotesque than the rabbit hunt at La Colinière, as McCordle is a comically bad shot who even manages to get himself winged by Meredith, who compounds his crime by knocking his father-in-law's Bloody Mary out of his hand during lunch. Later, when Denton has been exposed as a fraud and finds himself held in contempt by masters and servants alike, nobody bats an eyelid when Arthur 'accidentally' spills hot coffee in his lap.

Indeed, Altman is too nuanced a film-maker to side solely with the domestics while demonising the upper crust, as his whole point is that the two worlds provide a distorted reflection of each other. Consequently, it's open season on kicking Sir William's pampered lapdog, while the ladies think nothing of gossiping with their maids. Moreover, both upstairs and downstairs close ranks in the face of the police inquiry.

There is one sequence, however, in which the chasm is deftly emphasised. While the servants are in awe of a star like Ivor Novello, Lady Constance is far from impressed by the teacher's son who had appeared in such coarse motion pictures as Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger (1927) - which she insists on calling 'The Dodger'. Weissman picks up on this sneeriness and asks why Novello tolerates such ghastly people, to which he replies, 'You forget I earn my living by impersonating them.'

He is also more aware that everyone around them is playing a part than the gauche American, who cuts a somewhat ridiculous figure as he swears down the long-distance telephone to California and is more interested in his B movie than the real-life murder that has happened under his nose. Thus, when he is asked to sing for his supper, Novello directs 'The Land of Might-Have-Been' less to his companions in the drawing room than to the servants he knows are hanging on his every word while huddled together in the corridor shadows.

Fellowes has commented on the fact that this sequence was meant to convey that the staff possessed 'a kind of energy, an enthusiasm for sensation, while their employers are jaded and unable to accommodate the new'. Only the nouveau riche Mabel warms to the crooner, as Lady Constance pleads with her fellow bridge players not to applaud, as it only encourages Novello to play on. But it's a scream of terror rather than adulation that causes him to fall silent, as Sir William is discovered slumped over his desk and the ever-faithful Probert (Derek Jacobi) incurs the wrath of Inspector Thompson by trying to make him more comfortable without disturbing the knife in his chest.

In La Règle du Jeu, the murder is passed off as an accident and the police are not involved. Altman and Fellowes insist on a comic copper, however, who (as critic J. Dalrymple notes) seems to have read crime novelist S.S. Van Dine's 'Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories', as he so believes that the 'culprit must be a decidedly worthwhile person' that he neglects to question a single servant, even though they have far more information to impart, as Mary soon discovers.

At the risk of spoiling the film for those who have yet to see it, Cinema Paradiso shall merely allude to the deeply touching scenes that follow, as the murder mystery gives way to heart-wrenching human drama. As Renoir famously avers in his 1939 masterpiece, 'everyone has their reasons' and Fellowes makes astute use of this maxim in showing how his characters are dancing on the edge of the same volcano that the Frenchman had envisaged just months before the outbreak of the war that would consign a cosseted, leisured, glamorous, but unjust, delusional and dysfunctional lifestyle to history, where it has since been both romanticised and disparaged on the page and screen.

Everything in Its Proper Place

By the end of his career, Altman was renowned for juggling large casts and having big names jostle for minor supporting roles in his films. This must have made it easier for casting director Mary Selway to persuade so many front-rank British performers to sign up for Gosford Park. According to the gossip, it proved impossible to find slots for Alan Rickman, Joely Richardson and Judi Dench, while prior commitments prevented Kenneth Branagh and Robert Bathurst from joining the team. Seemingly, a last-minute issue caused Jude Law to be replaced by Ryan Philippe, as the imposturous Hollywood thesp.

There were also some astute touches in the cast choices, with Dorothy, the maid obsessed with Jennings the butler being played by Sophie Thompson, whose sister Emma had found herself in a similar situation with Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day. Neater still was the recruitment of Meg Wynn Owen as Lady Sylvia's personal maid, Lewis, as she had played Hazel Forrest, the typist who had married James Bellamy in Upstairs, Downstairs. And one can only surmise that Adrian Scarborough's performance as Meredith's valet, Barnes, led to him being selected for butler Warwick Pritchard when the BBC reopened the doors of 165 Eaton Place for its short-lived revival of Upstairs Downstairs (2010-12).

The actors were presented with etiquette books by Lady Troubridge and Eileen Terry to help them prepare for the shoot. Furthermore, Altman and Fellowes were such sticklers for authentic detail that they hired a trio of consultants who had worked in great houses in the 1930s: Arthur Inch, the son of a butler and housemaid who had buttled for Sir Richard and Lady Kleinwort; TV cook Ruth Mott, who had been a scullery maid to architect Alfred Waterhouse; and Violet Liddle, who had written an autobiography about her time as a parlour maid to George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill.

As Fellowes was on set to handle any rewrites, the cast could also draw on the experiences of his wife, Emma Kitchener, who had been a lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent. Much to Altman's frustration, Fellowes occasionally took exception to the odd anachronistic term that the actors used while improvising scenes. But his presence also led to a major plot change, when Fellowes noticed the similarity between Eileen Atkins and Helen Mirren and made their characters clandestine sisters.

He was, however, forced to change his original title, as Altman felt The Other Side of the Tapestry was too cumbersome. Following in the footsteps of Jane Austen (Mansfield Park) and E.M. Forster (Howards End), he named the film after its setting, although this did little to ameliorate Altman's struggle to raise funding. This was exacerbated by his own health issues and it was only after Stephen Frears agreed to be on standby that the project was given the green light.

What the Butler Saw

It took 10 weeks to complete the 143 scenes that comprise Gosford Park. Much of the shooting took place at Wrotham Park in Hertfordshire, which provided the exteriors, the dining and drawing rooms and the staircase. The upstairs bedroom sequences were filmed at Syon House in North London, while Hall Barn in Buckinghamshire stood in for Lady Constance's home and the location for the post-shoot luncheon.

The warren of downstairs rooms were built on soundstages at Shepperton Studios, with production designer Stephen Altman (who is the director's son) being detailed to give the functional rooms a 'backstage character' to contrast with the performance spaces of the state rooms.

Indeed, Robert Altman was so determined to present the action from the perspective of the underlings that he made it a rule that the camera couldn't pick up 'the posh people unless a servant is in the room'. However, any confrontation between the blue-bloods had to cease if a domestic appeared, despite Freddie reassuring Isobel that she has no need to fear George seeing them canoodling because 'he's a nobody'. Similarly, notwithstanding her assertion, 'I haven't got a snobbish bone in my body,' Lady Constance declares that she is breaking in Mary as though she were a dog.

Seeking to disrupt the reverential atmosphere that characterised the Merchant-Ivory brand of costume drama, Altman employed two cameras perpetually moving in opposite directions to show the amount of downstairs effort required to create the upstairs sense of leisured ease. Moreover, Altman had cinematographer Andrew Dunn adopt a zonal shooting strategy so that cast members could never be sure whether they were in the frame. The tactic later proved problematic for editor Tim Squyres, but he pieced the footage together to ensure that the audience had to decide where to look on screen rather than simply absorb any classically composed images.

As the majority of the performers had stage experience, they knew how to respond to Altman's technique in order to stay 'completely in character, completely in the moment, and interact with everybody in a way that felt as close to real life as you could possibly conjure up'. Altman told his actors, 'All of you are the lead. Whenever you're on the screen, your story is the main story.'

As everyone wore microphones, Fellowes was concerned that the dialogue would become a 'chaotic talk soup'. 'We put one on everybody.' Altman told an interviewer. 'Even if they don't have scripted lines, there's behavioural stuff in which people speak. Everyone goes at once. It's a three-ring circus. And if we scripted every word that everyone says in this picture, the script would be about 500 pages long.' Yet supervising dialogue editor Nina Hartstone ensured that every word could be clearly heard.

The strain of wrangling 40 actors, as well as instructing the crew took its toll on Altman, who often took naps between set-ups in order to conserve his energy. Unusually, the cast remained together for much of the shoot in order to generate a team mentality, which was reinforced by the fact that most worked for cost. In the evenings, Altman also invited everyone to view the day's rushes to foster both camaraderie and competition, as the stars teased and supported each other.

Nostalgia Ain't What It Used to Be

Such bonhomie couldn't have contrasted more with what critic Geoffrey Macnab called 'the exploitative sexual, financial and familial arrangements that made country house living in such splendour possible'. Yet many contemporary reviewers were so seduced by the all-star cast and the grandeur of the setting that they luxuriated in the very nostalgia that Altman had sought to negate in averring that working-class women in the 1930s had two career options: 'If they weren't housemaids, they'd probably have to be prostitutes.'

Such scathing insights might have been more appropriate from Luis Buñuel around the time he made The Exterminating Angel (1962). But critics and audiences would similarly warm to Tate Taylor's The Help (2011), another denunciation of privilege whose primary intention had not been to revive interest in the fashions and attitudes of a thankfully bygone era.

Back in 2002, Gosford Park grossed $87.7 million worldwide on a budget of $19.8 million, making it Altman's most commercially successful film since M*A*S*H. It also accrued 63 major award nominations, including five Golden Globes and seven BAFTAs. At the Academy Awards, Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith found themselves up against each other for Best Supporting Actress, only to lose out to Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind. Ron Howard pipped Altman for the same film, which also took the Oscar for Best Picture. But Julian Fellowes won the award for Best Original Screenplay and used his platform to condemn the electorate for punishing Altman for his contention that Hollywood had to bear a responsibility for 9/11 because of the violence in its movies.

Supposition that Altman and Fellowes might not have been entirely on the same page when it came to Gosford emerged when the writer devised the ITV series, Downton Abbey (2010-15), which very much pandered to the audience's penchant for post frocks and frock coats. Having also featured in Fellowes's second directorial outing, From Time to Time (2009) - which followed on from the story told in the BBC adaptation of Lucy M. Boston's The Children of Green Knowe (1986) - Maggie Smith put in another scene-stealing performance as Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, as the first two seasons broke the record for an international show at the Primetime Emmys by rackng up 27 nominations.

The press was less forgiving in its judgement of this slick escapist nostalgia, but Fellowes rode the wave to realise his Trollope adaptation with Niall MacCormick's three-part Doctor Thorne (2016). Moreover, he returned to the country house whodunit in reworking Agatha Christie for Gilles Paquet-Brenner's Crooked House (2017). He also returned to Yorkshire for Downton Abbey (2019) and is planning to visit again for Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022).

Altman also suffered a critical reversal with The Company (2003), although the 81 year-old had regained favour with A Prairie Home Companion (2006) by the time he died of leukaemia on 20 November 2006. He remained a maverick to the end, claiming that he couldn't give two hoots about how his pictures were received: 'The audience I can't really care about. They can come and see it if they want - I hope they do, I hope they like it - but I don't think about them when I'm making the film. I think about myself and the other artists I am collaborating with.' No wonder he could attract the biggest names.