Tanja Bulkova (Eija Karapää) arrives in Finland on a fake British passport, and reports to Mr Rosenberg (Ensio Jouko), a spy-master who operates out of a Helsinki photo shop. Her path crosses repeatedly with Erkki Kari (Joel Asikainen), a newspaper reporter chasing down leads concerning a murder and an arson attempt at the Finnish Wood Export Company. Now calling herself Toini, Tanja is working as a secretary to the industrialist Rautavuori (Arvi Tuomi), from which position she hopes to acquire money, blackmail influence, and access to more factories for her associates to bomb. Unfortunately for her, it doesn’t take long for Erkki to realise that she is the same “English Lady” he took a shine to on the train from Turku, now operating under a different name and with a different hair colour.

There was a new kid in town in January 1943, with the sudden arrival on the scene of Fenno-Filmi, an upstart studio to compete with the big boys. Lauri Pulkilla was a former sound engineer and Theodore Luts was an Estonian-born cinematographer, who had worked for both Suomi-Filmi and Suomen Filmiteollisuus in the 1930s. They were soon joined by Yrjö Norta, another refugee from the majors who had to pay “protection money” to his employers to free him from his existing contract.

Fenno-Filmi had hoped to come up with a stirring war movie for their first production, but were kept waiting for weeks while their application to shoot near the front line sat, unopened, on the desk of Gustaf Mannerheim, who had other things on his mind. Eventually, they pivoted to their second script idea, a spy thriller more ideally suited to low-budget shooting in urban settings. And budgets don’t come much lower than working under austerity conditions in the summer of 1942. Real-world locations saved money on sets, but presented the film-makers with a new logistical problem for moving their equipment around town. They eventually accomplished this with a home-made handcart, which the grips had to wheel manually from street to street to set up each shot.

But what a story. Eija Karapää has a part that most actresses would dream of, or possibly have nightmares about, switching identities and allegiances several times in the film, transitioning in the course of the film from dastardly enemy spy, to long-lost sister, Finnish patriot, double agent and love interest! Meanwhile, a script written with input from a real-world counter-espionage operative shines a light on petty propaganda coups and nuisance operations – many of the espionage and sabotage jobs we see Tanja’s associates carrying out are relatively simple monkey-wrenching, seemingly in the hope that enough spanners thrown into the works of wartime Finland will accumulate to have an adverse effect on national morale and performance.

Salainen Ase was by no means the first film of its kind in Finland – we’ve already seen similar materials on show in The Last Guest (1941) and The Dead Man Falls in Love (1942). But with a cast and crew eager to make their mark, it is a breath of fresh air in this chronological trawl through Finnish cinema history, complete with arty compositions, dastardly deeds and daring, and some wonderful scene-stealers like Liisa Tuomi (previously seen as the lead in The Silver Betrothal Anniversary), who lights up the screen with her flirtatious, sassy scenes as “Olly”, the brisk and cheeky lab assistant at Rosenberg’s photo studio.

If there is anything that hobbles this film with the weight of Finnish cinema tradition, it’s a plot that somehow makes the steely enemy spy also the long-lost sister of one of the heroes, and a narrative arc that has her switching sides and turning on her own people. But the press of the time (and me, right now) were happy to forgive that in the light of the film’s many other redeeming features. Its archive review coverage is full of words like fast-paced, cinematic, fresh, new, action-packed and captivating. “The Secret Weapon does not shine with star names,” wrote the critic for Uusi Suomi, “but it is all the more pleasant to get to know the new faces and to note that there are discoveries among them who probably still have a lot of work to do on the big screen.”

Nobody knew, at the time, that this first movie for Fenno-Filmi would also be its best received. Although the company would go on to make seventeen other movies, none of them would quite capture the shock of all these new faces and new ideas, which surely must have given Suomi-Filmi and Suomen Filmiteollisuus a bit of a wake-up call. The company would be back that October with Mascot (1943) and a month later with another spy thriller, Shadows Over the Isthmus (1943). I can only imagine the panic at the Big Two, where producers had spent many years happily waving through rural melodramas and prim romances. Surely there was at least one meeting about it? Surely the next year’s slate of Finnish movies would be new and exciting…? Right…?

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

In rural Finland in the 1860s, the young, handsome Taavetti (Eino Kaipainen) takes over his father’s struggling croft, and hopes someday to get himself a wife. He is too proud to sell his prize mare to the landlord Isoaho (Toppo Elonperä) but manages to win the hand of Maija (Ansa Ikonen), a spunky girl from the neighbouring farm at Töyrylä. It later transpires that local boy Jussi (Pentti Viljainen) had rather hoped to marry Maija himself, and regards himself of having been swindled out of a deal that was all but done.

Taavetti and Maija are made an offer they can’t refuse by the logger Veijonen (Veikko Linna), who is prepared to hand them a tidy sum for the lumber from 500 trees on their land. But Veijonen has dastardly deeds in mind, and persuades the locals who witnessed their deal to lie about it. Taavetti ends up getting into a fight over it, and must suffer through a court case in which he is accused of assault and of welching on a deal he never made. He is sentenced to 26 months in prison, where he unexpectedly bonds with his cellmate Antti (Edvin Laine), and becomes an accomplished carpenter.

Maija, who is predictably pregnant, struggles with getting in the crops at Rantasuo farm, grateful for the customary shared-harvesting tradition of talkoot, when everybody pitches in. Old Isoaho comes to her rescue when money-lenders try to foreclose on the farm, and when Taavetti finally comes home, having paid his unwarranted debt to society, all is well, the farm is flourishing, Isoaho has got the mare’s foal in payment for his help, and Maija and the child are waiting for him on the porch.

“Finally,” blurted the advertising copy for this adaptation of Urho Karhumäki’s 1923 novel, “we have a film with a strong Finnish spirit, a story of a Finnish forest ranger’s giant battle against vicious nature and malicious mankind – a struggle for which the prize is his own land and his own wife!” There are, after all, many ways to distract a nation at war. Rantasuon raatajat was released on the same day as its studio stablemate That’s How It is, Boys! (1942), but whereas Eino Ketola’s barrack-room comedy made light of war and duty, Toivo Särkkä’s script wades knee-deep into the fertile swamp of nationalism and local pride.

Shatneresque leading man Eino Kaipainen has been here many times before, most notably in Finland, Our Dear Native Land (1940). Here, he is reunited with co-star Ansa Ikonen from The King of Poetry and the Migratory Bird (1940), in an uplifting tale of struggle against adversity that pretends it is about tough times in the Great Famine, but is really all about maintaining a stiff upper lip in the midst of the Continuation War. As Taavetti, Kaipainen is a wronged hero who nevertheless wins through, a model citizen and even a model prisoner, who emerges from incarceration with a new skill and a best friend. Unlike the milksops of many a romantic comedy, he has an unreconstructed masculinity that is unafraid to fight for what he believes in, and a touching faith in the support of his loved ones.

I am particularly taken with the depiction of the talkoot in this film, because such communal mucking-in remains a feature of Finnish life today. They might have all come off the farms two generations ago, but twice yearly in my old street, all the plumbers and computer programmers, schoolteachers and car salesmen still got together to clear the leaves and trim the bushes until we’d filled a massive skip and could sit back for a coffee and a sausage. I once spent a happy day with my neighbour, Seppo, industriously digging a hole, until we were informed by another neighbour that we were supposed to be filling it in. Seppo made time pass, for him at least, by ceaselessly recounting everything he could remember about the songs of Whitney Houston, which was not a lot, because he couldn’t speak English, and I was obliged to translate each one for him. But I digress.

The press loved the film, describing it as a glorious “Christmas gift” from the Suomen Filmiteollisuus studio, and gracefully ignoring the fact that it often played like an obvious retread of Eino Kaipainen’s break-out picture, The Ostrobothnians (1936). At 42, in fact, Kaipainen was now a little long in the tooth to be playing a youthful lead, but he was not yet ready to slip into character work, and his public was not ready to let him. Ansa Ikonen, at 29, can just about get away with it, but the real-world Kaipainen was old enough to be his character’s Dad, and such cragginess can be distracting in a story that is supposedly about two youngsters barely out of their teens.

As ever, it was Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat who was best able to assess the film in both the context of its time, and its likely reception to posterity. “The plot itself,” she wrote, “with its relatively few turns of events and one-dimensional action, is not an exemplary film subject, but as a beautiful, devout film depiction of Finnish rural life, it defends its place well.” In its way, it is just as much as prisoner of its era as That’s How It Is, Boys!, fraught with what now seems to be overblown histrionics and intense passion, which are far more understandable in the context of film-makers and audiences who were facing the beginning of a fifth year of war and uncertainty.

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

The relentlessly cheerful Corporal Möttönen (Einari Ketola) is wounded in the Winter War, shipping home for a chance to see his wife and three children, who are exhorted to run their home life with military discipline. By the time he returns to the front, he finds himself ordered to be the local liaison for the entertainment troupe – a mismatched band of malingerers, milksops and drama queens. After he improvises a ditty about Päivänkilo (Eero Eloranta), a man who has been excused active service because of his bad tummy, Möttönen is transferred to the entertainment unit itself, where Päivänkilo confesses that he is ashamed of his previous behaviour, and that he wants to be a real soldier.

After another bout of home leave (he always seems to be off again to see the missus and his three aggressively cute children), Möttönen is the master of ceremonies at a massive show, where his ability to improvise and pull replacement performers out of the audience turns it into a roaring success.

This historical blog of Finnish cinema is creaking with the weight of military comedies, including The Regiment’s Tribulation (1938), Kalle Kollala, Cavalryman (1939) and Serenade on a War Trumpet (1939). And the war has been very much on everybody’s mind for the last three years, either openly acknowledged or conspicuously avoided. But Niin se on, pojat is an altogether different phenomenon, sneaking out in the last week of 1942 as a vehicle for a man who had been turned into a star by the war itself.

Einar Ketola had appeared in several films we’ve covered, but never in such a big role that he has been worth mentioning before. But in a creative environment in which production was stalled, many forms of entertainment were literally forbidden, and cinemas were obliged to stack their programmes with re-runs of old hits like Lapatossu (1937), Ketola became a sudden star-of-the-moment. In the two years before this film was released, he somehow racked up over a thousand performances, not merely in provincial theatres and dance halls, but at hastily cobbled-together frontline stages and in hospital canteens, where his “wooden-leg” humour was a welcome distraction for wounded veterans. Corporal Möttönen was his most popular character, a good-hearted barrack-room comedian always prepared to see the sunny side, and ready to brush off any setbacks with his breezy catchphrase: “That’s how it is, boys!”

The Finnish press dismissed the film with little more than shrugs, noting that it was a thinly disguised excuse for a variety show in the vein of SF Parade (1940), stitched together with scenes that allowed Ketola to reprise his stand-up material. Some of the big stars of the day lend some weight, including an uncharacteristically smiley Regina Linnanheimo, who shines in a Hawaiian dance number – is she only ever cheerful when she’s in a black wig?

When the writer-star himself was already admitting in interviews that Möttönen was a wartime phenomenon that was unlikely to last long in peace, this film is a fascinating glimpse of a star that shone brightly for a brief moment. “Some watch and listen to him with pleasure,” sighed Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti, “while others find him tedious when they see so much of him at once.”

Some reviewers objected to “tasteless” sequences ridiculing Josef Stalin – content that would become substantially more problematic after 1945. In the tense censorship environment that would cancel several wartime hits in order to avoid offending the Soviet Union, That’s How It Is, Boys! was shorn of ten minutes of footage, not merely regarding Stalin, but also lines in which Möttönen lent his support to the Nazi-inspired notion of a “Greater Finland” – a controversial issue even at the time, since many Finnish soldiers had joined up to defend their country, not invade someone else’s. Its star suffered an even worse fate, kicked out of the actors’ union on the pretext that his performances didn’t really count, and blacklisted from many Finnish theatres, on the grounds that he was a fascist sympathiser, and his presence on a playbill would draw dire consequences. His struggles even continued after retirement in 1969, when his right to a soldier’s pension was tied up for years in the reddest of red-tape delays.

Ketola’s crime, it seems, was being a massive propaganda success during the Continuation War, for which elements within the post-war administration were reluctant to forgive him. The story goes that he didn’t receive his pension until 1976, four years before his death, when President Kekkonen heard about his treatment, and heads rolled at the social security office.

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