There’s trouble on the Harri family farm. Someone called the farmer’s daughter Maija a whore, and now her fiancé Antti (Jorma Nortimo) is going to stand trial for defending her honour. Meanwhile, Maija (Irja Aholainen) has embraced an extreme, dour form of Lutheranism, and spends her time in the dining room fulminating about God’s will. Her brother Jussi (Eino Kaipainen) stands up to a bunch of marauding thugs, only to discover that Antti has absconded during the fight. Falsely accused of aiding the prisoner’s escape, Jussi gets into a fight with the local Sheriff, leaving both of them mortally wounded.

Considering how quickly the plot of The Ostrobothnians can be summarised, it’s amazing how long it takes to limp through it. Part of the problem is the interminable singing interludes, left-overs from the musical version of the original 1914 stage play by Artturi Järviluoma, as well as far too much time spent trying to wring humour from the sight of men drinking. Opera singer Irja Aholainen is supposedly the female lead, but is oddly mannish in the role, out-bloking many of her male co-stars, all of whom seem to be wearing more eyeliner than she is. Laila Rihte tries to take up the ingénue slack as Jussi’s would-be girlfriend Liisa, but appears to have got dressed in the dark at a tablecloth factory, wearing a distracting clash of checks and stripes like a human test card.

Jorma Nortimo, who thus far had only played cads for Suomen Filmiteollisuus, here manages a heroic, understated turn as Antti, a man who thinks Siberian exile will be worse than the awful farm he currently lives on. Eino Kaipainen is the stand-out performer as the put-upon Jussi, railing against injustice in a skin-tight sweater like a young William Shatner, and challenging a bizarrely well-dressed bunch of singing thugs to a wrestling match to save his village from a rumble. As the Russian-appointed Sheriff, Swedish actor Thorild Bröderman speaks Finnish like the foreigner that he is, adding to the disjuncture between the 1850s crofters and the aristocracy that lords it over them.

Directors Toivo Särkkä and Yrjö Norta do their best with the material, lifting it out of its original staging for some set pieces of dance meetings and outdoor locations, but The Ostrobothnians was a much-loved Finnish work because it was the closest thing that the country had to a national opera at the time. Ripping out most of the songs and trying to make it more filmy was never going to work, particularly when the best the film-makers could do was some point-of-view camera trickery to present a drunk’s-eye view of some of the scenes. And this wasn’t even the first time someone had tried it – there was already a film version ten years earlier, which apparently wasn’t enough.

Jonathan Clements is the author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland.