Pretty Good

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

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.

Chaplin again teams up with Fatty Arbuckle as drunks who argue with their wives in separate hotel rooms. The two comedians play drunks as well as anyone before or since. Minta Durfee, Fatty's real life wife at the time, plays his wife here. The spouses go at it quite a bit before Charlie checks out the commotion next door to find Fatty in the same situation he's in. Charlie and Fatty become fast friends and steal away to the hotel's restaurant while the wives argue with each other. Once in the restaurant, sight gags follow and then the wives. In minutes the whole restaurant is up in arms and Charlie and Fatty run off to get away stealing a boat in the process. The ending is grand. Look closely for Charley Chase in the restaurant. ** of 4 stars.

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.

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.