Sibling ribaldry
When the movie work began to dry up, Groucho Marx found a new lease of life as the host of a radio quiz show, You Bet Your Life. On one edition he had to make chitchat with a woman who had 10 children. She explained that the reason she had so many kids was that she loved her husband. "I love my cigar," quipped Groucho, "but I take it out of my mouth once in a while."
The line was deemed too smutty and never made it on to the air, but it captures the very essence of Groucho. On any other show a mother of 10 would receive a round of applause. With Groucho, she gets a slap in the face. For him, she's not a shining example of the beauty and nobility of motherhood; she's just some bird who's at it all the time.
Many comedians have been called irreverent and anarchic but Groucho and his brothers truly were, on screen and off. After years of hard-earned success on Broadway, where audiences lapped up their chaotic, anything-goes approach, the brothers arrived in Hollywood with an arrogant swagger. They knew they were funny and kow-towed before no one. Groucho, who had taken to wearing a fake greasepaint moustache in vaudeville, refused to grow a real one for the cameras. When MGM vice-president Irving Thalberg kept the Marxes waiting once too often, he returned to his office to find them stark naked, roasting potatoes over an open fire.
On set, the brothers were either ad-libbing mavericks or undisciplined show-offs, depending on which of their collaborators you believe. During the filming of Animal Crackers (1930), the director had small prison cells built, in which he would lock the brothers to stop them running off. Their early films captured the wild energy of their stage revues, a loose plot around which the Marxes and their writers could wreak havoc.
Monkey Business (1931) is essentially one long sketch on board an ocean liner, with the brothers as stowaways who burst out of their hiding place and run amok like wild Tex Avery cartoons. There's a genuine sense of anarchy in the film, the banter and hi-jinks feel fluid and improvised, as if someone had just turned the cameras on and let the brothers loose. They're forever sliding into frame, encountering a ship official or a dignified passenger and humiliating them, physically or verbally, for no other reason than because they can. Chico and Harpo race and tumble and roller-skate around on deck while stowaway Groucho runs rings round the dazed ship's captain: "I don't care for the way you're running this boat. Why don't you get in the back seat and let your wife drive?"
Born of the Great Depression, the brothers were unhinged maniacs with no roots, no ties, no responsibilities, fighting back on behalf of the disenfranchised little man. As the normally silent Harpo once put it: "People all have inhibitions and hate them. We just ignore them. Every man wants to chase a pretty girl if he sees one. He doesn't. I do. Most people at some time want to throw things round recklessly. They don't - but we do."
Many people point to Duck Soup (1933), with Groucho as a president deliberately leading his country into an unnecessary war, as the archetypal Marx Brothers movie. Certainly it's as pertinent as ever, but personally, I think Monkey Business is their definitive film. It's shamelessly self-indulgent and full of aimless chaos and, although it may look quaint and dated, the sense of pointless rebellion throughout is as modern and anarchic as, say, punk rock. And much funnier than anything John Lydon ever spouted.
While Chico is the perfect lowlife cross-talking straight man and Harpo an endearing clown, it's Groucho who steals every film. He happily tramples across everything, from beds and tables to social manners and civilised behaviour. Many of the great comic personas - Woody Allen, Oliver Hardy, to name but two - want to be part of society; they want to be thought of as sophisticated, intelligent, desirable. Not Groucho. What does he want? Seemingly nothing. He romances women but only really to pass the time, insulting them relentlessly as if he had made some wager with himself to see how far he can push it before they crumble.
"You're one of the most beautiful woman I've ever seen, and that's not saying much for you" he tells the long-suffering Margaret Dumont. "I could dance with you until the cows come home. On second thoughts, I'll dance with the cows until you come home." It's as though he has some strange form of Tourette's syndrome: "I can see you and I married. I can see you bending over the stove. Funny, I can't see the stove!"
With A Night at the Opera (1935), producer Irving Thalberg proved he could cut half the laughs and make twice as much at the box office by introducing a proper story. By making the Marxes help two young lovers outwit a villain, he gave their unfocused madness some purpose. Good storytelling logic - but the brothers were never about logic and, after Thalberg's untimely death, they tried to repeat his formula with less and less success. By the time of A Night in Casablanca (1946), the brothers were looking old and undignified as they clambered around on an aeroplane trying to foil some Nazis.
It was a far cry from the Marx Brothers of the 1930s, when they were considered so left field that Salvador Dali wrote a script for them called, rather predictably, The Marx Brothers on Horseback Salad. Dali considered Harpo to be a kindred spirit and even if they weren't thoroughbred surrealists, their mischievous, sideways thinking was adored by the likes of Antonin Artaud and Eugene Ionesco. As with the absurdists, nothing in Marx-land was sacred, least of all plot or story or the conventions of realism. Only a few years after Al Jolson had first spoken on screen, Groucho was bursting through the fourth wall by addressing the audience directly: "I've got to stay here, but there's no reason you folks shouldn't go out into the lobby till this thing blows over."
Their disregard for conventions of form and their verbal non-sequiturs pre-dated the anarchy of the Goons on radio and Monty Python on TV. Indeed, the Marx Brothers might well be the most influential screen comedians of all time. Chico and Harpo's infantile love of pointless destruction has been recycled endlessly by the great (John Belushi on Saturday Night Live) and the not-so-great (Freddie Starr on Des O'Connor). Groucho was obsessed with sex years before Woody Allen, and was taking swipes at authority long before Bill Hicks. His wise-ass put-downs ("I don't want to join any organisation that would have me as a member") have not only informed the smart-alec backchat of everyone from Bugs Bunny to Bill Murray, but have also become the kite standard for every stand-up comic since.
In Horse Feathers (1932), Groucho is the coach of a football team. He takes a girl boating on a lake but is instantly infuriated by her cutesy baby talk. "Is gweat big strong mans gonna show liddle icky baby all about those football signals?" she says, trying to seduce him. "If icky girl keep talking that way," responds Groucho, "big stwong man gonna kick all her teef wight down her thwoat." It's the sort of misanthropic intolerance of other people's insufferable pet habits that could have come straight out of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, the hippest US comedy of the moment.
Are the Marx Brothers still relevant? Does it matter? Nothing stays cutting edge forever. When I was young Eddie Murphy was considered a foul-mouthed bad influence. Nowadays, he's family-friendly Doctor Dolittle. Does that diminish how cool and exciting he was in Beverly Hills Cop? Not for me. The Marx Brothers' movies may have dated but, thanks to my dad, I started watching them when I was very young and I was charmed by their lunacy long before I'd realised that they were running amok in the distant 1930s. To keep their legend alive, Marx Brothers fans should be watching them on DVD in front of impressionable young kids. If you can get your five year old hooked on Harpo's mugging and Chico's pidgin English, they'll soon acclimatise to the scratchy sound and creaky plots, and will be primed to fully appreciate Groucho once they hit puberty. Get 'em young and the Marx Brothers will remain as irreverent and irreplaceable as ever.
· A Marx Brothers season runs at the National Film Theatre, London SE1 until June 30. Box office: 020-7928 3232.