The Rounders (1914)

That was an excellent one.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

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.

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.

Most Keystones do not age well. Comedy tastes have changed over 90 years, and the hyper-speed frantic randomness of the early Keystones tend to leave the viewer wondering what was supposed to be funny. And frequently, plots are both too complicated and stereotyped.This one is different. There ain't no plot. All that happens is that Chaplin and Arbuckle, roaringly drunk, annoy their wives, patrons of a restaurant, and eventually the entire civilized world (which seems to have found its way to Griffith Park in LA.) Charlie Chapin and Fatty Arbuckle are very, very funny drunks. They just have the routine down. Chaplin's drunken behavior around his wife is hilarious, because he knows how to make inanimate objects do all the wrong things, and he knows how to pitch his body in all sorts of wrong angles. Arbuckle is not the comedian that Chaplin is, but he keeps up, particularly when he and Chaplin start to demolish a posh restaurant.The key to this short is pacing. Chaplin and Arbuckle do not spaz out in the typical Keystone way, to assure everyone what hysterical fellows they are. They just move according to their own looped logic, and let the application of that logic be the humor.The ending, by the way, can be taken as a bit of a cosmic statement -- and is that rare thing in a short comedy -- the perfect closing gag.

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.