Robert Altman, a talented director in the 1960s, directed and co-wrote the script with Bob Balaban, known worldwide as the cartographer in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and as the NBC executive who looked down Elaine's blouse in Seinfeld. Despite this kind of high-powered talent, and a cast that included Balaban and Ryan Phillipe (Buffy's horny brother-in-law in Cruel Intentions), the movie sucked.
One problem with these British movies is that they star actors from Britain, who are taught to speak as though their mouths are filled with cotton balls. American technology is designed to defeat this; I simply turned on subtitles, as I would for a movie filmed in Swahili or Hindustani.
Gosford is set in 1930's England, where aristocrats still reigned. Under the British caste system, anyone born in an inbred household of arrogant assholes automatically qualified for Nobility, and people of lower rank slobbered over themselves for the opportunity to polish their Lords' and Ladies' boots with their tongues.
The story takes place in one such household, the McCordle's: an elegant family composed of a rapist, his slut wife, her magnificently self-righteous mother, and their wimpy daughter. Kind of a mix of Kennedys and Clintons.
On the weekend of our story, every aristocrat east of the Atlantic is arriving to bitch at each other and shoot unarmed peasants--er, pheasants. Every arriving personage has a couple or so servants, so in no time at all, the viewer gets a cinematic feast of forty-two main cast members (count them yourself) mumbling at each other while drinking, smoking, and screwing. To make viewing an even more exciting challenge, each of the manservants has two names--their own for use among each other, and the name of their master when among their "betters." So we get a dozen or more instances of characters with two names and two characters sharing the same name!
Not much happens for the first several hours of the movie. At one point, we are treated to full-backal female nudity (well, above the waist), but that's about it. Sometime around the three-quarters point, say six or seven hours into it, someone gets murdered and before you know it we are back among the servants, listening to them mumble about their jobs.
Eventually, a police inspector arrives who turns out to have been rejected by Inspector Clouseau of the Sūreté for being too incompetent. He would like to solve the crime--but only if doing so wouldn't inconvenience any of the snobs. Since it would, he leaves.
We eventually do find out whodunnit and discover this was actually a rather clever story and might have been pretty good had it starred different actors, taken place in a different country, involved a cast one-sixth the size, used a better script, and been half as long. As it is, the show left me with a nagging feeling we took the wrong side in World War II.
Still, the last ten minutes almost convinced me to remove one vacuum. Maybe if they had used multiple camera angles for the nude scene....