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

There is certainly a group of people that would bill the 1914 short film The Rounders as comedic gold, but to me, it seems more like two great, even legendary, comedic actors slumming or going through the motions. The Rounders, to Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin, seems nothing more than a warmup for larger, more thoughtful shorts and full-length features. It's perfectly safe and innocence, as nearly all comic shorts were during this time period, but for two large names comes a great deal of expectations that The Rounders barely fulfills.We watch Arbuckle and Chaplin stumble around town drunk, fighting with their girlfriends and eventually being chased out of town by other townspeople following Arbuckle attempting to strangle his wife after she hits him. That element alone is a bit extreme, especially for a film of this era, and Arbuckle and Chaplin simply do not funnel the same kind of energy into the story or the gags to back something like that up.The Rounders winds up having an entertaining final minutes because things finally pick up and become pleasantly manic. However, at the same time, sitting and watching Arbuckle and Chaplin stumble their way through town isn't so funny when one recalls what these actors have done and would go on to do later in their careers. For them, this was an impromptu warmup exercise on the set of a film in comparison to their other works.Starring: Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Directed by: Charlie Chaplin.

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.