Fugitive Niilo Nurmi (Unto Salminen) is languishing in a San Francisco jail when he is mistaken by the local consul for Yrjö Sahlberg, a Helsinki rich kid who has been missing for years. That is enough to secure him passage home, but whereas Niilo expects to ditch his new benefactors on arrival in Helsinki, he is instead blackmailed into continuing the pretence that he really is the long-lost heir to the Sahlberg fortune. His old criminal buddies, watch-thief “Kello-Kalle” Karlsson (Aku Korhonen – the nickname translated roughly as Charlie Clock, compare to his earlier role as Charlie China in Off with the Shirt and Vest) and kingpin Einari Oksa (Ossi Elstelä) threaten to out him unless he keeps up the act, hoping thereby to secure access to the rich pickings at the Sahlberg mansion.

Welcomed as a prodigal son on his return to the Sahlberg household, Niilo soon discovers that someone is already robbing the family. A thief set to catch a thief, he soon works out that they are being embezzled by their shop manager Kapperi (Yrjö Tuominen), and wrests a confession from the flustered employee. The Sahlbergs are even more pleased with their “long-lost son”, although Niilo must fight off the continued predations of Oksa, who is fobbed off with the wrong keys to the safe, and Karlsson, who wins the heart of the mansion’s cook Tekla (Siiri Angerkoski) and has to be given a job at the company to keep him quiet.

Falling for his “cousin”, Annikki (Ansa Ikonen), Niilo resolves to tell her the truth. She confesses that she, too, has feelings for him, and persuades him to turn himself in, although when he tries to do so, the police inform him that the statute of limitations has run out on all his old crimes, and he has failed to commit any new ones. That’s more than can be said for Karlsson, who is caught stealing the police inspector’s watch, and has to be bailed from prison so he can live happily ever after with his own betrothed, the entertainingly snuggly Tekla.

All’s well that ends well, although when the aged Grandma Sahlberg (Anni Hämäläinen) announces that she will never let Niilo go “again”, the viewer is left pondering if she really is aware, as she has formerly claimed to be, that he is not her beloved Yrjö at all, and that Finland really isn’t just about to see yet another set of cousins get married.

Freely adapted from the Swedish film Like a Thief in the Night (1940, Som en tjuv om natten) Uuten elämään features an oddly post-modern moment in which the writer-director Toivo Särkkä could not decide himself whether Niilo would hand Oksa the right keys, giving into his threats, or the wrong keys. Consequently, he shot both versions, and only decided at the editing stage that Niilo would swindle the swindler.

The film begins with a whole two seconds of stock footage of San Francisco harbour, before switching to a dive bar packed with an unconvincingly “American” crowd listening to a woman singing a torch song in English with an entertainingly German accent – several obviously Finnish women, a Chinese guy, and what appears to be Swamp Thing in an undertaker’s suit. This was clearly shot back home in Helsinki, although in order to distract us, the director executes a 360-twirl around the pub, which only serves to make it look as if the cameraman is drunk.

As so often happens in romantic comedies, the supposed leads are a pair of insufferable drips, and what little entertainment that can be wrung from it comes in the form of the supporting cast. Aku Korhonen puts on a spirited turn as Karlsson the inveterate pickpocket, and is as charming as ever in his interactions with Siiri Angerkoski – I have actually lost count of the number of times these two have ended up as a second-string romance in the background of the A-plot. None of this, however, would save it from the knives of Finland’s critics.

“There has never been a film on the big screen as clumsy,” wrote the reviewer for Uusi Suomi, “The plot of the film is psychologically impossible, and when, in addition, the audience was forced to endure outright indecencies along the way, the viewer left the show disgusted.” I actually read this review before I saw the film, and was all prepared to enjoy some outright indecency, but found it sadly lacking in this department. Other newspapers were similarly damning, with the Ilta Sanomat declaring it to be: “An out-of-date, thoroughly melodramatic and preachy film story presented with a tasteless sentimentality that is suspiciously reminiscent of ‘true stories’ from weekly newspapers.” When the Ilta Sanomat thinks you’re downmarket, you know you’re in trouble.

The two heavyweights of 1940s Finnish film criticism, Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat and Toini Aaltonen in the Suomen Sosialidemokraatti, both tried to make positive noises about it, but had to concede it was hackneyed. Only the writer for Savo magazine, out in the sticks where people were more easily pleased, came to its defence as a welcome relief from war and strife, noting: “Despite its naivety and lack of realism, My New Life will gain the support of our film audiences, because it has so much of the warmth and beauty that is needed as a counterbalance to today’s harsh and serious reality. And perhaps that was the main purpose of this film.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.