Gosford Park: The house is the star

A house plays a vital character in Robert Altman's new film 'Gosford Park', says David Thomson. But it's not the first time a building has been the star of a movie

As a country house murder mystery, Gosford Park has modest but genuine entertainments that put it a little closer to the emotional ethos of Agatha Christie or Clue (the 1985 film in which Colonel Mustard may have done it in the library with the rope) than to the astonishing confusion of upstairs and downstairs in Jean Renoir's magnificent The Rules of the Game (1939). Never mind, Robert Altman was always a tease as well as a master, and while he plainly has affection for Wrotham Park (which stars as Gosford), antique wallpaper and the panorama of English character acting, he matches Renoir in one crucial insight: he knows that the house is not just the stage for a melodrama, but a character in what unfolds.

Altman has always had a feeling for place: think of the raw-wood township peeping through the snow in McCabe and Mrs Miller; or that Malibu Colony house in The Long Goodbye, where the plate glass windows reflect the sand and the surf, and bring the Pacific into dreadfully violent homes. Think of Nashville itself, a frontier city where the rural South meets fake Palladian architecture, and the chaos of recording studios. Altman sniffs place – its structures in steel, stone and brick, as well as the human, social bonds. And so Gosford Park is a story and a house where the servants are subtle masters. Of course, they have to obey orders, they earn a pittance and they have no prospects. But they make the beds, scan the laundry; they know every secret place in the rambling house, every back staircase and cubby hole, and if the grand but helpless master of the house wanted to fuck a lowly housemaid, why the maid would know the safest place to do it. And she would tidy up afterwards – and dream of slipping poison into the old rogue's bedtime cocoa.

I'll say no more about Gosford Park, for fear of spoiling its game. The real occasion of this piece is to shine a light on movies in which a house, a building or the idea of structure plays an essential part in the action. So there's a way in which Gosford Park reminded me of another American director looking at a house and its social fabric. Joseph Losey's The Servant, made in 1963, is a crueller demolition of the master myth that anything Altman offers.

The Servant begins with the beetle figure of Barrett searching out the right house in Chelsea – I believe the house is still there, on Royal Avenue. He tiptoes in on squeaking shoes to find a fine house in disarray, with the master, Tony, asleep in a deck chair. Tony needs a manservant, he thinks. But Barrett's insolent gaze sees how much more extensive the "looking after" may be.

The Servant was a novel by Robin Maugham, scripted by Harold Pinter. But it had another line of ancestry, too: it was a Joe Losey film, designed by Richard MacDonald (and in any survey of production design in film, MacDonald deserves his place). The Servant wasn't shot inside that house in Chelsea: the rooms were too narrow, the location would have been a traffic problem. So the interior of the house was built at Shepperton. It was the first film set I ever visited, and I can remember the rooms – the hot spots in the house – dotted all over one sound stage. They were beautifully thought out and made, and they were as important to the movie as Pinter's dialogue, or the strange seduction that affected Dirk Bogarde (Barrett), James Fox (Tony) and Sarah Miles (Vera, the "maid" hired in by Barrett).

The Servant was like a theorem: the beautiful, rich Tony is actually feeble. Barrett comes in and subtly "does" the house – furniture, pictures and so on – in ways that offend Tony's Sloaney girlfriend (Wendy Craig) and alert her to the master's life being stealthily appropriated by Barrett. It's only when the house is fixed up, and Tony's life seems to be in full swing, that Barrett begins the undermining – Cora is the cat that works that trick, but as Tony is degraded so the house reverts to kitsch, trash and chaos.

Of course, The Servant was nearly apocalyptic – scripted by a man balefully opposed to upper classes (he seems to have mellowed) and directed by the Losey who was in Britain only because he had been forced out of America by McCarthyism. On stage and screen, for decades since, Britain has often reverted to a cosier regard for the kinship of upstairs and downstairs (also the title of a TV series partly launched by Eileen Atkins, who plays the cook at Gosford Park).

Gosford Park is set in 1932. Only six years later Daphne du Maurier created a house that would live (and die) on the page and on the screen. I'm thinking of Manderley, the house in Rebecca to which Maxim de Winter brings his new bride, the nameless "I" who tells the story, the upstart second Mrs de Winter. Rebecca is titled after Max's first wife, dead before the story begins, but a force hanging over the house, and with her own surrogate, Mrs Danvers.

The movie was made in America, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by David O Selznick. The two men fought bitterly over the picture, yet its effect is so smooth and potent, and Manderley and Mrs Danvers are milestones not just in production design, but in the special atmospherics of horror that can be attached to movie houses. The scene in which "I" risks going into Rebecca's closed room and is caught there by Mrs Danvers is still breathtaking. Made in 1940, it was so far ahead of dull censorship codes, that it got away with Mrs Danvers passing her hand through Rebecca's underwear, and nearly willing "I" to throw herself out of the window. Of course, in hindsight, you have to read Maxim (Laurence Olivier) as peculiarly self-destructive and plain stupid that he hasn't destroyed the haunted house long ago and set out to give the new bride a real chance. There is a pattern in these stories of the master being unsafe to life and limb.

Rebecca never called itself a horror film, and it's fascinating to see how Hitchcock gradually slipped into that genre. But time after time, Hitch did movies in which the setting was a fabulous part of the magic – think of the staircase in Notorious, the series of apartment windows that James Stewart beholds from his Rear Window, and finally the extraordinary tension in Psycho between the low-slung, modern motel and the Gothic house that sits above it on a hill. There in a single image was the notion of some ghastly past hanging over the present.

This is one of the ways in which Hitchcock taught audiences and later film-makers to see. Moreover, in this rapid survey of production design, it's worth remembering that directors as diverse as Fritz Lang and Michelangelo Antonioni had early training as architects. Then recollect that Lang is the maker of perhaps the film that most influenced architects – Metropolis – in love with skyscraper forms, with ducts, ramps, dead ends, traps and vortices. While Antonioni did a movie called Zabriskie Point in which all the pent-up rebelliousness of American youth is visited on a luxurious home in the desert. At the end of the movie, this house explodes and Antonioni revels in the intensely beautiful, slow-motion scattering of all the parts – as if to pass a verdict on all vanities of pride and prosperity that think to civilise the desert.

There's an intriguing undertone in all of this, I think. It is that "home" for most of us is a warm, safe, comforting idea. We make our homes to suit ourselves, to be secure and happy in. And yet, the home once photographed has an odd way of turning into a metaphor for a prison, or for a place still haunted by the unresolved crises of family and the past. Think of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, where he built the vast interiors of the luxurious Overlook Hotel on London sound stages, put an "ideal" American family unit there as winter caretakers and then waited for the walls themselves to sprout ghosts, and worse. By the end of the movie, mother and child flee in terror. It's as if we are to beware of all ideal places and perfect homes.

And yet 50 years of American movies and TV series, and above all commercials, have created the image of an ideal residence for Americans so that architects and builders alike have had to conform. Thus American interiors have all that lovely sunbathed space where home bodies can luxuriate. But why is it then, that in a certain light, you can see some shape materialising in the sunlight, some shape ... God, Harry, call the estate agent!

There is a new movie coming, from David Fincher – he did Se7en and Fight Club – called The Panic Room. It's about a mother and a child who move into a new city apartment and discover that there's a cunning extra room built in to it, with steel walls, surveillance systems and emergency rations. Why would we need that, they ask. Have they never seen a movie before where the house has a history and a mind?

'Gosford Park' opens on Friday