Reino (Toivo Palomurto) is a high-level engineer at a shipyard, laid off along with many of the workers as the recession bites. His girlfriend Maire (Ester Toivonen) is sure they’ll muddle through, but her father, the shipyard owner Mr Rauta (Yrjö Tuominen) has other ideas, and is determined to find a more suitable suitor for his daughter. Mistakenly believing that Reino has stolen ten thousand marks, Rauta forbids Maire from seeing him, although all’s well that ends well after she’s fought off the cad Korppi (Jorma Nortimo) and the scheming shopkeeper Nixman (Kaarlo Kartio).

Erkki Karu planned on directing this remake of the Swedish Uppsagd (1934, Laid Off) after completing the previous year’s The House at Roinila, collaborating on the script with Ensio Rislakki, a journalist and satirist known for wordplay and literary parodies. But Karu’s demise dumped the project unceremoniously on Glory Leppänen, a 35-year-old theatre director whose film experience was limited to acting roles in a couple of silent movies.

Inadvertently becoming Finland’s first female film director, Leppänen delivers Onnenpotku (A Stroke of Luck) on the cusp between silent and sound. A dozen plot points are conveyed by close-ups on letters, notes and posters, as if she misses the days of intertitles, and in what is either a provocative staging decision or a fault in the audio, a whole dance sequence without any accompanying soundtrack. It is as if she doesn’t trust audio to convey anything of worth, causing several sequences to unfold as mime. Most notably, the rude mechanical Jussi (Aku Korhonen) accidentally robs the nervous shopkeeper Nixman, when the latter mistakes his cigarette case for a gun, a scene played entirely silently, when the words “Oh, it’s only a cigarette case” might have helped dispel the misunderstanding.

In a reversal of the original Swedish version, the Finnish title “A Stroke of Luck” emphasises the hero’s escape from straitened circumstances, rather than his unemployment. The film certainly caught the spirit of its time, finding a Recession-era audience ready to sympathise with its downtrodden workers making the best of a bad situation. Employers and capitalists are presented as snarling baddies, with both Korppi and Nixman sporting ridiculous caterpillar moustaches. If anything, Leppänen is let down by her leads, both of whom had played similar roles before, but who seem ill at ease with performing as a couple already in a relationship. When they kiss, it looks like Palomurto is trying to eat Toivonen’s chin. Meanwhile, Yrjö Tuominen is creepily hands-on in his dealings with his on-screen daughter, constantly pawing at the former Miss Finland under the guise of delivering paternal advice.

Toivonen seemed to spend much of her acting career similarly put-upon. She was still only 22 at the time she appeared in this, her third feature film, catapulted into the limelight by her beauty-queen status. That, in itself, carried a heavy burden, forcing her into a role as an example of pure Finnish womanhood, intended to demonstrate to overseas immigration bureaus that Finns were Europeans, not as had been argued in some quarters, Asians. Pushed into an acting career she for which she was ill-prepared, she would marry and retire at the end of her twenties, later writing in her memoirs of her perpetual annoyance with directors, critics and cinema-goers who were unable to see past her looks.

But many workers in cinema’s early days were similarly finding their feet by trial and error and would not necessarily stick around – Glory Leppänen would return to a successful career in theatre; Toivo Palomurto would retire behind the camera to become a film composer, and Jalo Kalima, who played “Man in Coffee Shop”, would go back to being the Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Helsinki.

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

Boss-eyed wantwit Adalbert (Kaarlo Kartio) inherits nine thousand marks from his uncle. Deciding, for reasons unclear, that he really wants to open a milk shop, he finds a job at the swish Helsinki department store Sampo, in order to learn about sales. There, he is swiftly dragged into the schemes of the vivacious shop-girl Irja (Ester Toivonen), who persuades him to become the store’s in-house scapegoat. Whenever a customer has a complaint, Adalbert publicly takes the blame, thereby saving the more established staff from censure.

Adalbert soon tires of his role, but glumly agrees to work out two weeks’ mandatory notice, during which time Irja comes to realise the error of her ways, and that her suitor Mr Vaara (Jaakko Korhonen) is really the owner of the company, observing his wayward staff undercover.

Based on a 1930 stage play of the same name by Yrjö Soini (a.k.a. Agapetus), director Erkki Karu’s film displays an uncharacteristically ham-fisted grasp of the cinematic medium, alternating between locked-off shots of entire scenes from the stage version, occasionally invaded by sudden, poorly integrated close-ups. The contemporary Ilta Sanomat review pointedly noted its failure to utilise the potential of the movie camera. This looks and feels like what it is – an unimaginative restaging of the play, occasionally enlivened by location footage.However, Syntipukki (Scapegoat) is notable for its location shots, not only of what was then Heikinkadu in central Helsinki (thirteen years before the street was renamed Mannerheimintie), but also of the famous Stockmann department store, which itself was only completed in 1930, and doubles for the fictional Sampo. There are some touching moments of local colour, particularly a sequence of an army of cleaners, bashful before the camera, as they arrive to prepare the store for its morning opening, and a bunch of naturalistically irritating schoolboys in the street, who have plainly ignored the director’s exhortations to neither look at the camera nor get in the actors’ way. In a remarkably confident decision on product placement, Stockmann embraced the idea of a film that showcased its flagship store, seemingly shrugging off the depiction of the staff within as work-shy and corrupt. Compare this to the more modern sensibilities of the Reebok corporation, which sued TriStar Pictures for $10 million in 1996 after the Tom Cruise vehicle Jerry Maguire took money for product placement and then had its cast repeatedly shout “Fuck Reebok!” on camera.

No such worries appear to have bothered Stockmann, which is presented as a lavish paradise of consumption, complete with sequences of a catwalk model show where Adalbert is pursued by a female contortionist, and a café performance by the singer Mary Hannikainen. The cobbled streets outside have altered remarkably little; the fixtures within are similarly unchanged, except the famous Stockmann Clock, which was not installed until 1965. Considering the fetish that every guidebook and language textbook has for wittering about this supposedly iconic meeting spot, it is strange indeed to see shots of the outside of the store that do not include it. As the good-hearted innocent Adalbert, Kaarlo Kartio is a holy fool, his nose pressed literally against the glass of the shop windows in a scene that both allegorises his outsider status and milks it for comedy value. He represents the vast majority of Helsinki urbanites, only recently arrived from a “countryside” that suddenly finds itself on the outskirts of a modern city, baffled by the customs and mores of the metropolis, even though many of the people around him are likely to be only a generation or less removed from similar rural backgrounds.

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