In another disappointing short comedy, Charlie Chaplin once again plays the standard, belligerent drunk, drinking himself into oblivion and then stumbling around this run-of-the-mill slapstick comedy. There are some mildly interesting items, such as the fact that the altogether unamusing but watchable opening scene features Chaplin and Keystone colleague Fatty Arbuckle as fellow drinkers in the pub, taking beers away from each other and gradually getting drunker and drunker, as well as the fact that this is one of the earliest, maybe even the origin, of one of Chaplin's gags that he would later perfect and use with great success, the lighting of the match on the seat of his pants. Other than that, there is not much else of note here.
The comedy of the film is really nonexistent, which is not to say that it is entirely bad, just a failed experiment. The obnoxious drunk has long since lost its appeal, if it ever had any, and I imagine even audiences back in 1914 must have been getting tired of it. The film features some of the most blatant racism of any of his films, although certainly not the last (remember the three minds with but a single thought from A Day's Pleasure?). At one point late in the film, Charlie follows a woman right into her home and hits on her, and is then horrified when he realizes that she is black. He also drops a lighted match into a black man's hand when he holds it out for a tip, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes this drunken character so dislikable.
Most of the rest of the film is composed of people pushing and shoving other people around and hitting each other, and ultimately it seems that Chaplin simply uses drunkenness in the film to serve as a reason to stagger around and hit people and get in fights with swinging doors and fall over stairway banisters and such. The plot outline on the IMDb says "A very plastered fella follows a pretty woman home, and proceeds to make a nuisance of himself." And sadly, there's not much difference between watching the film and reading that one line.
