Retrospective Film Review

Gosford Park (2001) • 20 Years Later

When a murder is committed at an English country house in the 1930s, there’s no shortage of suspects above or below stairs

The butler did it. Maybe. Almost everyone in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park is a conceivable suspect in the killing of Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) in the library of his country house in 1932. And inevitably, in a film which gleefully parodies the Agatha Christie school of crime story while making its own razor-sharp commentary on class and exploitation, the line “the butler did it” is actually spoken by a character.

However, screenwriter Julian Fellowes (who later created Downton Abbey, originally conceived as a Gosford Park spin-off) rightly described the movie as a “who-cares-whodunnit” and the killing of Sir William — indeed the whole plot — is only an excuse to portray characters and the way they live.

Unlike the traditional country-house murder mystery, however, Gosford Park is at least as much concerned with the servants below stairs as with the toffs above. And one of these — Mary…