TheLittleSongbird 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

DKosty123 This 1914 Comedy short has pretty much survived intact due to the fact that Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed & starred in it. Most of Chaplins work survived because of his fame.This one has a distinctive cast as Chaplin teams with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle as a pair of drunks who come home to their wives, both of whom are obviously upset with them. In fact there is a lot of physical comedy as both drunks come home & both angry wives get physical with them & start pounding them. Charlies wife pounds him & puts him into Bed to sleep it off. Arbuckles wife pounds him & leave him on their apartment floor to sleep it off.Charlies wife gets concerned about what is going on with Arbuckle & his wife as they make quite a noise. She wakes up Charlie & they go over too see what's happening. After another round of physical stuff, Arbuckle steals his wife's purse, & the money in it. Then he & Charlie go to a fancy restaurant for another brawl with bar patrons. Charlie Chase & Edgar Kennedy pop up here.Overall this is slap stick physical comedy that worked well in 1914 but does not have that taste for today's audience. The ending has our drunks wind up in a lake in a leaky rowboat & drown as their horrified wives scream at them from shore.This is before Chaplin did the Little Tramp. This is Charlie doing drunk and with all the talent in this cast, I guess a real plot was not needed. Wives punching out drunk men, maybe in 1914 - but it seems today that is very rare.

MartinHafer 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.

SnorrSm1989 By the late summer of 1914, Chaplin's confidence as a film director and performer seemed to be well established. Though still a newcomer in the medium, he had developed a sharp understanding of the essential mechanics of motion pictures remarkably fast. His films were never below the average Keystone-standard as far as I'm concerned, and some are easily among the funniest things produced at the company during this period, THE ROUNDERS being a good example. It's strict "drunken act comedy," with obvious borrowings from Chaplin's years in the music halls, but does not feel like a filmed stage routine; certain bits could only have worked well on film.Neighbors and pals Charlie and Roscoe (of "Fatty Arbuckle"-fame) arrive home in drunken condition, leading to heavy arguments with their respective wives. They soon hurry out again, and decide to stay over at the local bar for the night. They are hastily thrown out of the bar as well, however, and as their wives have begun a search for their husbands, our heroes seek peace in a row-boat at a nearby lake. There, they fall asleep while the boat sinks; whether they ever wake up again remains unconfirmed. Through this very simple and much-used premise, Chaplin and Arbuckle manage to come up with many funny bits; Roscoe using a cloth as his feather-bed while trying to get asleep at the bar is one highlight. The two work perfectly as a comedy team, and only the absence of well-defined personalities (they are both quite vulgar and drunk) makes a comparison with Laurel & Hardy a bit far-fetched.Years later, Roscoe Arbuckle is reported to have said that he regretted to not have appeared in more films with Chaplin than these loud and fast Keystone-films. Even so, the two did turn out together at least one of the funnier films Chaplin appeared in during that single year of 1914. Not a masterpiece, quite loud and somewhat vulgar, but pretty amusing. (This review has later been somewhat revised and updated, Dec. 2012)