The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

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 Masquerader', 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 Masquerader' 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 Masquerader' is not as hilarious, charming or touching as his later work and some other shorts in the same period. The story is flimsy and the production values not as audacious. Occasionally, things feel a little scrappy and confused.For someone who was still relatively new to the film industry and had literally just moved on from their stage background, 'The Masquerador' 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. Although the humour, charm and emotion was done even better and became more refined later, 'The Masquerader' is still very amusing and hard to dislike. It moves quickly and doesn't feel too long or short. It is Chaplin's second endeavour in drag, 'A Busy Day' being the previous one, and the far more successful one.Overall, far from one of Chaplin's best but pretty good and perhaps one of his better efforts from the early Keystone period. 7/10 Bethany Cox

"The Masquerader" is a 1914 short film by Charlie Chaplin and of course he also plays the main character. This one is already over 100 years old, so it should not be a surprise to anybody that it is silent and in black-and-white. And besides Chaplin, it also co-stars the very prolific, but pretty unknown Chester Conklin, a very bearded version of Chaplin not only because of the name, and of course Roscoe Arbuckle, who is still somewhat famous today, even if a bit of it is rather bad press than great achievements. I personally like him and his presence, so I am a bit disappointed he did not have a better script to work with because then this could have turned out an actually enjoyable watch. But this way, it is no such thing and I give it a thumbs down. By the way, the version I just saw ran for 12 minutes and not 9 what IMDb says, but it maybe just had fewer frames per second.

Watched from an old VHS tape of 5 1914 shorts, the quality on this as with the others 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 though less so in this case than most of the others. Not that it matters a whole lot, as this is for the most part like the other shorts very simple films with lots of knockabout action, broad humor, and very little else."The Masquerader" might be the best of the five, with the action taking place in a film studio and Charlie as an incompetent actor -- so an early example of the self-reflexive nature of film at work here -- only to return after being canned as a beautiful, dolled up actress. Chaplin's mimicry and makeup is really quite amazing here -- he had me fooled, anyway. The film also features Fatty Arbuckle as a rival actor who at one point gives Charlie gasoline to drink! His scene with Charlie, on opposite sides of a dressing-mirror in a dressing-room, is a classic of timing and facial expressions and has the feel of improvisation.

In The Masquerader, Chaplin sort of breaks the fourth wall, in that he appears in the film as himself, sort of, and then changes into the costume of the Tramp a few minutes into the movie. Similar to his work in Film Johnnie, Caplin creates mayhem on set during shooting and promptly gets himself fired. Just before he leaves, he throws his suitcase at his boss and some hilarious mayhem ensues.The next day, Charlie returns dressed as a woman named Senorita Chapelino ("...a fairy floated into the studio..."). He is disturbingly convincing as a female, and of course all of the men at the studio come forward with aggressive amorous advances. Eventually, of course, Charlie is discovered, and this is followed by some of the best of those hilarious fight scenes of nearly all of Chaplin's early comedies. As with all of these old comedies, this one is deteriorated pretty badly, but there is still some pretty good editing at the end of the film. One thing about films made during that time is that they move so fast, and this fast motion makes some of the shorter shots go by so fast that some of them are almost incomprehensible, and the editing of these films seems to have suffered from this. But at the end of The Masquerader, there is some editing that is better than usual in these early comedies, particularly in the scene where he falls into the well.Fatty Arbuckle also appears early in the film as a fellow actor, which might be the most interesting scene in the film since Chaplin and Arbuckle play themselves, basically, as they get ready to go to work. I think The Masquerader is a bit of a milestone, as Chaplin is clearly developing the character of the Tramp as a down and out everyman just trying to turn his luck, rather than resorting to drunkenness or so much punching and kicking as in so many of his earlier films.