Buster Keaton: Last Action Hero – Silver Screenings

In the summer of 1993, Columbia Pictures released a big-budget film about a boy who is transported inside a movie to help the hero fight crime. The movie was Last Action Hero, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It was an $85 million failure.

Other directors have tried meta themes of movie characters being pulled into – or out of – movies within movies (e.g. Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo). However, we think one of cinema’s earliest action stars did it best, even though the film was considered a disappointment upon its release.

Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) was a money-maker, but audiences and critics weren’t over-the-moon ecstatic about it.

Variety panned it. “This Buster Keaton feature-length comedy is about as unfunny as a hospital operating room,” writes a grumpy reviewer in the May 28, 1924 issue. “[I]t’s a flop, and the week’s box office receipts at the Rialto will undoubtedly prove…

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