Rich trophy wife Kristine (Hanna Taini) is exuberant at the opportunity to return to her native Lapland on a business trip, where she swiftly ditches her priggish industrialist husband Gustav (Sven Relander) and volunteers for a tour of some of the outlying work units. She is placed under the care of the dashing Suontaa (Olavi Reimas), a capable, entitled woodsman who has recently transferred from the government forestry commission and remains ill at ease with the priorities of corporate logging.

“Treat me like a lumberjack!” she breathes. Oh, this is going to be trouble.

During nights under the Lapland stars, and days spent travelling in a real-life one-horse open sleigh, Kristine and Suontaa swiftly see in each other a kindred spirit. But both of them are married, and each resists the temptation of what Suontaa calls a karhu-leikki (“bear’s game”) – a dangerous flirtation. Quoting Immanuel Kant, because he’s that kind of lumberjack, Suontaa observes that he is guided as ever by “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

Director Valentin Vaala’s Lapland romance Vihreä Kulta, filmed partly on location in Kittilä and Pallastunturi, delights in the opportunity to present Finland as the nexus of a global business. These trees end up as “a floor in Scotland, a ceiling in Holland, or a pub table-top in Marseille” – leading to a well-depicted clash between the cosmopolitan industrialists and the simpler folk of the forests. This is best summed up by Heikkinen, a melancholy woodsman comically unsuited to his job, who mourns the death of every tree, and rails against the businessmen who only see “three 18-foot logs and a bit of firewood on top” in a 200-year-old fir.

At least, I think it was Heikkinen. In a bizarre and unrepeated experiment, Green Gold has almost no written credits, instead announcing the major cast members as a voice-over in the style of a religious antiphon, as if a congregation of mumbling worshippers were chanting “starring Keanu Reeves” at the beginning of John Wick. I thought for a moment, that this was going somewhere, and that part of the plot would revolve around the powerful religious fundamentalism to be found in parts of the Finnish hinterland, but no, the only thing that this affectation achieves is to severely damage the film’s artistic heritage. Without visible credits, it is extremely difficult to work out who is who, and eighty years later, its Finnish Wikipedia page lacks a credit list. Full marks, however, to whomever it was that decided the name Fanny Aromaa would be nicely inconspicuous for Elsa Rantalainen’s doctor character.

The film had a troubled production, with the wintry location shoots plagued by bad weather and corrupted footage, so much so that although Vaala began shooting right after completing The Women of Niskavuori (1938), reshoots delayed its release until October 1939. Vaala managed to shoot and release Rich Girl (1939) in the interim. By the time the film reached cinemas, Finland was on the brink of war, which reduced cinema attendance and made its scenes of peacetime prosperity seem out of place.

Green Gold was Vaala’s third adaptation from the plays of Hella Wuolijoki, rushed into production (without adequate appreciation of cold-weather shooting) after the box office smash of their earlier collaboration The Women of Niskavuori (1938). Wuolijoki’s stage version, in fact, featured a cameo role for a “Mrs Soratie” (the titular Juurakon Hulda, after her happy ending), who offers relationship advice to Kristine once she returns, pining for the pines, to Helsinki. This, however, does not appear in the film version, possibly because actress Irma Seikkula was off filming For the Money (1938) with another director.

The film’s only major flaw is the complete lack of chemistry between the two would-be lovers, who seem emotionless and uninterested, placing far too much faith in the scripted dialogue to convey their irresistible attraction and tormented resistance. But there are certain elements that are only revealed in hindsight – Gustav is an insufferably patronising cockwhisk in the opening scenes of the play, but later revealed as a two-timing cad, whose clandestine relationship with a busty Swedish waitress Kristine has been discreetly overlooking.

Meanwhile, Suontaa’s wife Alma (Lea Juotseno) has a single scene in the first half of the film, where she rolls her eyes and laughs about her husband’s love of the wilderness. This is later revealed as evidence of a marriage facing irredeemable collapse, as Alma matter-of-factly announces when she pays a house call on Kristine with her new and more acceptable beau, a portly magistrate. This is a cultural element worth noting – a habitual bluntness and honesty among Finns can often wrong-foot foreigners, while what in English might be regarded as harmless banter can leave Finns red-faced and shocked. Both Suontaa and Kristine are destined for divorces from the very first scene, but such a nuance is inaudible to the English viewer, who hears spouses playfully insulting each other on a daily basis.

All’s well that ends well. Gustav can have his booby Swede and Alma can have her fat judge, and that frees Kristine and Suontaa to run off into a hut in the woods. It’s not quite the cross-class romance of Juurakon Hulda, since Suontaa is an educated man, and Kristine has been yearning for a log cabin since the start. And it does rely rather conveniently on a degree of sleight-of-hand, in which two frankly more interesting plots happen off-screen purely in order to leave Kristine with the moral high ground. I probably would have preferred to see a film about Suontaa’s apparently amicable divorce, which ends with a bogglingly contemporary custody agreement over his two off-screen kids, or Gustav’s torrid affair with a woman who has a Laughing Buddha statue on her mantelpiece. This last item is dismissed, in a moment of jarring racism, as a “Chink” souvenir, which I would have liked to hear more about.

In a welcome bonus, the DVD of this Suomi-Filmi production comes with Finnish, Swedish, English and French subtitles, as well as a short film, Helsinki Awakes, crammed with valuable footage of the workers in Finland’s capital, going out their business in the early hours of a pre-war morning.

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