Am a big fan of Charlie Chaplin, have been for over a decade now. Many films and shorts of his are very good to masterpiece, and like many others consider him a comedy genius and one of film's most important and influential directors. He did do better than 'The Rounders', still made very early on in his career where he was still finding his feet and not fully formed what he became famous for. Can understand why the Keystone period suffered from not being as best remembered or highly remembered than his later efforts, but they are mainly decent and important in their own right. 'The Rounders' is a long way from a career high, but has a lot of nice things about it and is to me one of the better efforts in the 1914 Keystone batch. 'The Rounders' is not as hilarious, charming or touching as his later work and some other shorts in the same period. The episodic story is flimsy and the production values not as audacious. Occasionally, things feel a little scrappy, occasionally repetitive and confused.For someone who was still relatively new to the film industry and had literally just moved on from their stage background, 'The Rounders' is not bad at all, pretty good actually. While not audacious, the film hardly looks ugly, is more than competently directed and is appealingly played. Chaplin looks comfortable, with shades of his distinctive style here, and shows his stage expertise while opening it up that it doesn't become stagy or repetitive shtick. Fatty Arbuckle is also great and their chemistry carries 'The Rounders' to very entertaining effect.Although the humour, charm and emotion was done even better and became more refined later, 'The Rounders' is still very amusing, cute and hard to dislike. It moves quickly and doesn't feel too long or short.To conclude, decent. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Like all of the very early Chaplin works on this VHS, the quality is rather poor and there are dropouts -- not from the tape, but from the film elements -- sometimes enough so that the action is hard to follow. Not that it matters a whole lot, as these are for the most part very simple films with lots of knockabout action, broad humor, and very little else. This short with the previous "Masquerader" is a little bit more imaginative and interesting than the first three."The Rounders" again features Fatty Arbuckle; this time Charlie and Fatty are neighbors in a cheap apartment building, each with wife trouble: Fatty beats up his wife, while Charlie gets beaten by his. They make enough racket that their wives get angry and send them next door to shut up the other neighbor, but after a little bit of knockabout Charlie and Fatty decide instead to split some booze and go off to a fancy restaurant, where after more mischief they are kicked out, only to go off in a leaky rowboat together, apparently drowning at the finish! Just about as good as the previous short, "The Masquerader", quite solid and re-watchable.

This is a film from Chaplin's first year in films. During this VERY hectic year, he churned out film after film after film for Keystone Studios and the quality of the films are, in general, quite poor. That's because the character of "the Little Tramp" was far from perfected and the films really had no script--just the barest of story ideas. While some Chaplin lovers might think this is sacrilege, all these movies I have seen are pretty lousy. Yes, there are some cute slapstick moments but barely any plot--absolutely NOTHING like the Chaplin we all came to love in his full-length films of the 20s and 30s.This movie pairs Chaplin with Fatty Arbuckle. They drink and punch and fall down a lot. That's really all there is to this film. Content-wise, it's a big fat zero.

Chaplin once again plays a drunk, but this time the result is much better because he plays alongside Fatty Arbuckle, another, ah, giant of the silent comedy. Charlie plays a drunk guy who goes home drunk to his wife, his life's "big mistake." At the same time, Charlie's neighbor across the hall goes home drunk to his wife, and of course, each couple gets into hilarious arguments.Charlie's wife sends him over to the room across the hall, thinking that with all the commotion, someone must be getting murdered over there. When he gets there, he finds a similar situation to his own, and after much confusion, the women wind up arguing with each other, and Charlie and the other man wind up stealing money from the other man's wife and going out to drink more.The following scene, at the restaurant where they go to drink, is one of the funnier scenes in the movie, as each man pulls off a table cloth and uses it for a blanket while he goes to sleep, "making themselves at home." Charlie busies himself lighting matches off of a bad man's head and fighting with the restaurant's employees. Eventually, their wives find them, and they wind up fleeing for their drunken freedom, ultimately stealing a canoe and pushing off with it, falling asleep side by side in it as it slowly sinks. An uncharacteristic ending, but at least it was different, and with the speed with which they cranked out these films in 1914, a little variety goes a long way.