Twenty years after leaving for America to seek his fortune, Sami Nenonen (Joel Rinne) returns to Finland to brag about his good luck. Now exotically calling himself “Sam Nelson”, he looks up his old buddy Väinö Suominen (Yrjö Tuominen) and persuades him that the shares he has to offer are a licence to print money. Although Väinö has a change of heart, Sami has already invested 100,000 marks, and after a tense interval, the Suominen family starts to earn dividends.
Daughter Elina (Sirkka Sipilä) graduates from high school and starts courting a young suitor, much to her father’s annoyance. As the money continues to roll in, the household gains disruptive modern conveniences and distractions, and the maid, Hilda (Siiri Angerkoski) struggles to cope with having a maid of her own – Angerkoski, incidentally, steals the opening scene for me by making pancakes like a boss. The traditional Thursday night austerity dinner of pea soup and pancakes is replaced with newfangled consommé, leading some family members to question what they are really gaining. It is Väinö’s wife Aino (Elsa Turakainen) who really puts her finger on it, when she is poured into an uncomfortably expensive dress and subjected to a night out with Sami and his wife, whom she finds to be cynical and brittle.
This leads to a subtle dig at haters of Finnish cinema. At the Nelsons’ snooty soiree, Aino innocently asks a guest if he has seen “the last [latest] Finnish film.”
“I haven’t seen the first one!” he scoffs. “Smart people don’t bother with them.” Such metatextual japes extend to a scene in which a film director tries to persuade Elina to become an actress, in which Arvo Kuusla, in the innest of in-jokes, impersonates the director Nyrki Tapiovaara, whom members of the film community alone would recognise as the director of the previous year’s One Man’s Fate (Miehen tie) for the rival studio Eloseppa.
One of the film’s most strikingly self-aware moments is where Aino persuades Elina to stick to her previous career choice of becoming a nurse, rather than giving it all up to become a singer-actress. It strikes an oddly discordant note, in which a bunch of actors earnestly hector their audience about how careers in the arts are for the privileged few, and it is far more noble to have a useful job. But Aino is fighting a one-woman front against Mammon, sternly informing her family that “money isn’t everything”, and for once, not winking at the audience that it still really helps – see for example, the grasping money-mindedness of Rich Girl (1939) or The Vagabond’s Waltz (1941). Instead, she is practically overjoyed at the news that Väinö’s investments have failed, and that henceforth the family is back to normal, scrimping and saving and meeting every Thursday for a hearty, happy dinner – compare, here, to the similar make-do-and-mend austerity of the same season’s If Only I Had the Power (1941).
Suomisen perhe began life in 1938 as a radio show, and would go on to chronicle Finnish middle-class life for the next twenty years. Only a handful of the 400 broadcast episodes survive today, along with half a dozen movie adaptations, of which this is the first – four more were made before the end of 1945, and a finale arrived in 1959 after the radio show came to an end. With a peak audience share of 52%, it functions today as a fascinating barometer into the way that Finns saw, or hoped to see themselves in the good old days: Dad with a safe job as a civil servant, mum and three kids in the family home, and a merry housemaid performing all the tasks that would be taken over by machines in the post-war era. One can still find Finnish homes from the 1940s that have a small bedroom oddly en-suite to the kitchen – such architecture is a hold-over from the days when a live-in housemaid was common.
The series moved with the times, often in step with government policy – during the war, the family gained two evacuated children in order to normalise such issues with the general population. This first movie adaptation introduces “Sam Nelson” as a handy catalyst to suddenly transform the lives of the family, only to bring them crashing back to normality by the end in a handy reset. The combination of an American visitor and good Finnish people was also catnip to expat audiences – at least one print of the film would surface in America among the cinema screenings of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and other areas with strong Finnish emigrant populations.
The Finnish press enjoyed the movie’s celebration of normal life, particularly its look back to the simple days of the pre-war era, with Uusi Suomi praising its appeal to “Finnish hearts both young and old”, and enjoying its “gentle jibes at human frailties.” Olli Ohtomies in the Ilta Sanomat was similarly touched by its celebration of the little highs and little lows of everyday life, and “a silent hymn of praise to a peaceful and warm home, happy parents and their healthy children.” Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat also loved it, but offered insightful comments about the degree to which it owed its look, feel and presentation to the Hardy family movies beginning with A Family Affair (1937), which made a star of Mickey Rooney. She was bang on the money – in fact, director Toivo Särkkä at Suomen Filmiteollisuus had made the young Lasse Pöysti watch a number of the Hardy films, of which ten were already in existence by 1941, and to imitate Rooney as best he could in his own performance as Olli, the young son of the family. He did so in the expectation that as the years went on, if the Suominen films became a series of their own, Olli would age into the role of the young lead, as indeed he did with Olli Suominen’s Stunt (1942).
Pöysti and his fellow child-actor were new for the movie – their radio originals were played by actors in their thirties, who could never have got away with it on camera. Among the Suominen children, Maire Suvanto’s career struggled to escape from being identified as Pipsa – her sole role as an adult actress was as the older Pipsa in The Suominen Family is Here Again (1959). In adulthood, she found a new career as a teacher, firstly of drama, and latterly of deportment to the sales-clerks at the Stockmann department store in Helsinki. Lasse Pöysti, on the other hand, stayed in the limelight, becoming an accomplished actor on stage and screen, and the manager of several well-known theatres.
The Suominen films themselves did not age well, written off by Tapani Maskula in the Turun Sanomat as little more than “stiff theatre” when they were rebroadcast on television in the 1990s. Still, he conceded, “the merits of the work are more historical than artistic. It offers an excellent sample of the lifestyle of the Finnish middle class in exactly the decent and innocent form in which it wanted to be marketed at the time.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.