After what has plainly been a long, long wait through her teenage years, enthusiastically modern orphan girl Raili Wirma (Sirkka Sipilä) collects her inheritance and prepares to flee the stern supervision of her maiden-aunt guardians – a terrifying trinity of scowling women, who glower at her as she joyfully packs. They warn her that she might be biting off more than she can chew, but she laughs it off and skips out the door, ready to make her fortune as a secretary in That Fancy Helsinki.
Before long, she is overwhelmed by the mounting costs of her bachelorette apartment, literally crowded by men on the staircase proffering bills. She is vanquished in office politics by Saara (Kaisu Leppänen), the boss’s favourite who even appears to be winning the flirtatious attentions of eligible bachelor Topi (Jorma Nortimo, directing himself, in his own script adaptation). Attempting to drown her sorrows at a “bachelor boy” party where all the girls dress up as boys, she becomes trapped in a series of misunderstandings, ejected from Topi’s house after she catches him a clinch with Saara, and roped into helping the drunken Captain Nilsson (Jalmari Rinne) find his way home.
Kindly offered a floor for the night by Mrs Nilsson (Lilli Sairio), Raili repays her kindness by delivering a package for her to the Femme Belle beauty salon. Since she is still dressed as a boy, she is a hit with the lusty proprietor Mrs Schmitt (Elsa Rantalainen) who laments that if only Raili were a girl, she would offer her a job. Seeing the chance to get back on the employment ladder, Raili announces that “he” has a twin sister who would be ideal…
Now living a double life as “Risto” the delivery boy and “Tytti”, Risto’s twin sister, Raili must keep switching disguises to evade the police, who want to arrest her for defaulting on her debts. The creepy artist Erkki (Joel Rinne) witnesses one of her elevator quick-changes, and uses the information to blackmail her into becoming a model. When he badgers her to take off more clothes (there is, in fact, a wholly gratuitous nude shot, much appreciated by your correspondent), she throws herself on the mercy of the deputy judge Olli (Finland’s Shatner, Eino Kaipainen), who inevitably falls for her himself.
Raili soons runs into trouble at the salon, where she avenges herself on the oblivious Saara by agitating her delicate skin and giving her indelible mascara freckles. Fired by Mrs Schmitt, she returns, dejected to the family home, where her day is brightened by the news that some other relative has died, leaving her enough money to bail herself out of her self-made problems as if she is an American conglomerate or a British politician. She invites Erkki to a restaurant to tell him that his blackmailing no longer works, only for the lovelorn Olli to see them together and assume the worst. Donning her Risto disguise for the last time, Raili arrives at Olli’s house, ostensibly to deliver a painting of herself. Olli recognises her for who she really is, and proclaims that for her “crime” he will sentence her to life imprisonment.
Marriage… he means marriage. To which Raili replies that his punishment will be to be her jailer.
She accepts… that means that she accepts.
Unmentioned on this blog since her welcome state of undress in Dressed Like Adam and a Bit Like Eve (1940), Sirkka Sipilä lights up the screen with her modern charm, bopping to jazz and wearing a skirt scandalously above the knee. Like her counterpart Helena Kara in The Bachelor Patron (1938), she is a creature that we can only in hindsight understand to be out of her time. Nowhere is this more obvious than at Topi’s naff party, where a singer with crimped hair warbles through a dance number, and revellers in tuxedos and frilly ballgowns seem inexplicably excited by the sight of paper streamers. There are times, in fact, when Raili parades around in deco chic, while the other actresses seem largely clad in tablecloths and animal pelts.
Of course, once she turns up the androgyny as “Risto”, she becomes even more anachronistic, tucking her hair under a flat cap, and drifting ever closer to a French gamine look that would be regarded as the height of sexiness a generation later. In part, this is because she isn’t actually very good at playing a man – compare to Tauno Palo’s similar cross-dressing exploits in Dressed Like Adam and a Bit Like Eve.
Based on the young adult novel Mörk punkt (Black Spot, 1934) by the Swedish-Finn Melita Tång, Perheen musta lammas replays the cross-dressing comedy of The Man from Sysmä (1938) in a contemporary urban setting. Eino Palola, writing for the Helsingin Sanomat, damned it with the faintest of praise, calling it “different in a nice sort of way”, albeit lamenting that “a little cutting and gluing here and there” would have streamlined the film’s dramatic cul-de-sacs and lagging pace. “The film lacks focus,” agreed the critic for Uusi Suomi, “taking the second step before the first.”
Right at the end, the film writes itself into and out of a veritably queer spot, as Olli’s housekeeper looks on in tight-focus horror as her boss appears to be passionately fondling a teenage boy. But when we cut back to the young lovers, Olli waves the housekeeper away, his fiancée now magically transformed back into her feminine self, dress and all. Phew, that’s a relief.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.