Their primary purpose was in being the idiots who somehow got the better of Grass (as in snake in the), and who generally humiliated him by being his abiding company. I'd grant Chico sound only for putting the skids of ice-cream logic under poor old Grasping. Harpo can have it for those instants of klaxon farting.Chico and Harpo weren't so much his brothers as the Other. But in my scheme they would have played piano and harp in silent pictures - profuse cadenzas set to the peaceful inanity of silence. As if any amount of fraternity or imprisoning company could impair his heartfelt loneliness! I don't want to be harsh to Chico and Harpo (they are helpless, addled kin to a genius). By which I mean to say that I am a Grouchus myself, just able to tolerate the whim that gave him sidekicks known as "brothers". Still, Mr Louvish knows that accuracy does not wrap up family matters, especially when Groucho - the Hamlet, the Falstaff and the Shylocked one of the family - would rather crack wise than utter painful truths.

And it's not so vital to know which film it was where Grouch said, "Love goes out the door when sex comes innuendo." Rather, Grouchery is a suppressed energy and verbal defiance, a surreal glaze that reaches out into the world, embodying all his films, yet evoking pictures never made or dreamt of, to the damp brink of one's own miserable life. It's unambitious, though winningly uncool.Gilbert Adair returns next week. Simon Louvish set me thinking. His new book lacks the carbuncular splendour of his earlier work on WC Fields, but it's a tasty group biography, and the most reliable Marxist history we're ever going to get. The Secret Laughter of Women looks at a small Nigerian community in the south of France, and features the gruff but curly Colin Firth. Luc Besson's Taxi has a talented driver helping the Marseilles police. The Children of the Marshland concerns the doings of a group of peasants in the Loire Valley in the 1930s.

Dreaming of Joseph Lees, a love triangle set in Fifties rural England, benefits from starring Samantha Morton, who brings a huddled yearning to what is essentially a gloomy Mills and Boon story. In The Astronaut's Wife Charlize Theron is pregnant with twins, and fears it may have something to do with an inter-space encounter of her astronaut husband (Johnny Depp). Alastair Sim in the title role is just dying to be nice- Scrooge, itching to dance about in his thermals - the character's sweet revolution utterly captured And the rest of the week's releases are a tawdry mix. Now, that was a car with gadgets.Scrooge, the 1951 adaptation of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, is re-released this week. I'm afraid my favourite Fleming adaptation will remain Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Under aerial attack, Bond is still flanked on either side by those two neat parallel lines of bullets.

And those same gobsmacked passers-by still punctuate the pursuit, spilling their Chablis on their tablecloths And still we go back for more. They are too scared (after 19 films!) to play variations on their franchise's staples - on the Q scene, on the countdown scene, on the closing sexual joke - and too unblushingly lazy to tart up their long-outmoded chases. Worldwide, the giggles and hoots smack of guilty mass denial about the diminishing returns of an exhausted form.And for two decades the Broccolis have utilised our camp response to legitimise their incredible slovenliness and timidity and hubris. The Bond cultists at my screening, with their cheery applause at "classic" moments, unconsciously patronise Bond.