Gosford Park - DVD review

Robert Altman's acclaimed and award-winning 2001 film Gosford Park is a whodunit that isn't really a whodunit. The first time I watched it, rather naively I focused on the whodunit aspect of the story and the plot, and found the film enjoyable but not quite the masterpiece it was supposed to be. Now I've taken another look at the DVD version, which includes some useful bonus features, and I'm even more impressed than I was originally.

Really, Altman took the idea of a Golden Age whodunit in a country house setting and used it as a context for a story about the class divide in the age of masters and servants. More or less everything is seen from the perspective of "below stairs", and the amateur detective work, such as it is, is undertaken by a servant. There's a lot of humour in Julian Fellowes' script, and there are many nice observations. I've never watched Downton Abbey, but there's no doubt he's a talented writer.

There is a large ensemble cast, and one of the doubts I had about the film originally is that this means that many of the characters are undeveloped. A large cast also makes it difficult to care about many of the suspects, and the plot of the story isn't its strong point, though there is a pleasing and inventive use of tropes such as the body in the library, the double killing, and impersonation.  Stephen Fry's police inspector is amusing but buffoonish, perhaps excessively so.

As for that cast - wow! Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith (in brilliantly waspish form as the Countess of Trentham), Kristin Scott Thomas, Charles Dance, Tom Hollander, Geraldine Somerville, Jeremy Northam (as Ivor Novello!), Helen Mirren, Kelly Macdonald, Laurence Fox, Alan Bates, Clive Owen, Derek Jacobi, Emily Watson, Eileen Atkins, Richard E. Grant...There's a lot of pleasure to be had from simply watching such stars in action. I can recommend this DVD; it's definitely a film worth watching more than once.

Doors Open: TV review

Doors Open, a TV film based on Ian Rankin's novel, was ideally suited to a screening on Boxing Day - a light and very entertaining thriller, involving an art heist and benefiting from an excellent cast. Three friends, played by Stephen Fry, Douglas Henshall and Kenneth Collard, have varying motives for indulging in an amateur robbery on a grand scale - the theft of valuable paintings from a bank vault.

The trio soon realise that they need professional help, and - needless to say - this is where things start to get tricky. For the career criminal who helps them out is in hock to a nasty English gangster, who is all too ready to take ruthless revenge if he is not paid back what he is owed. The complications increase because Henshall's character is still emotionally involved with a former lover (played by Lenora Crichlow), who just happens to have been brought in to assesss the bank's collection of art before it is sold off.

I've been a fan of Ian Rankin since the early 90s, when I read his first Rebus novel. A few years later, I was delighted to receive from him a contribution to the first CWA anthology I edited, Perfectly Criminal. The story, "Herbert in Motion", won him a Dagger,and that, too, concerned an art theft. So Doors Open had, for me, an added interest.

The jaunty and sometimes obtrusive soundtrack emphasised, perhaps too insistently, that this was a "feelgood" show rather than anything serious, but I found it very enjoyable, even down to the finale, which borrowed a device used in Christie's Why Didn't They Ask Evans? and other Golden Age stories. The acting was good, and there were some funny lines (including reference to the ultimate feelgood heist movie, The Italian Job). When last seen, Henshall was playing the deranged villain of The Secret of Crickley Hall. Soon he will morph into Jimmy Perez in Shetland. He's becoming almost as ubiquitous as - well, Stephen Fry.