On leave from the battlefront, officers Ryhmy (Oiva Luhtala) and Romppainen (Reino Valkama) try to head for Helsinki on a train, but are briefly discommoded because the last carriage has become detached. Onboard the train, the mysterious beauty Dora (Kirsti Hurme) tries to buy stolen papers from the shady-looking foreigners Kars (Santeri Karilo) and Virt (Sasu Haapanen), who throw Dora off the train.

In Helsinki, Ryhmy and Romppainen encounter Dora at a club, but are pursued by Santa Rosa (the fiercely over-acting Ville Salminen), an Argentinian journalist who thinks they are the thieves of the missing papers. Before long, the officers, the mysterious Dora, and the two foreigners are playing a game of cat-and-mouse across Helsinki, alternately double- and triple-crossing one another. Eventually all are arrested by Colonel Rastola (Paavo Jännes) who is inconsolable about his missing documents. When it is revealed that Dora is in fact his daughter, Ryhmy reveals that he has been hiding the papers in his boot, and hands them over.

The first, but by no means last of a sub-genre of espionage movies to arrive in Finnish cinemas in the 1940s, Ryhmy and Romppainen’s concentration on an urban chase for a McGuffin seems born of the doubt among producers as to whether or not Finland would be at war when the film was released. Similarly, the concentration on vaguely defined “international ruffians” avoided a plot that might allude directly to the recent Winter War, or indeed the chances that Finland might be obliged to play nice with Russians at some future date. Consequently, producers at Suomi-Filmi chose to adapt the second of Armas J Pulla’s popular series of novels, in which two hapless soldiers somehow get to win medals and have adventures without ever really being in danger. Such larks were a feature of the Ryhmy and Romppainen books, the first ten of which enjoyed their heyday during the war, with five tardy sequels stretching into the early 1960s. With a dynamic not unlike the much-loved Lapatossu series, prints of which were a popular choice among soldiers at the front, Ryhmy and Romppainen is also a clear inheritor of the carnival celebration of military life to be found in many other films, including Red Trousers and Kalle Kollola, Cavalryman.`

The film features a long musical interlude at a masked ball in South American costume, all castanets, sombreros and cacti, which gives the cast a chance to dress up in ever more ridiculous get-ups.

Ryhmy and Romppainen were remarkably pacifist heroes, preferring to off their opponents Asterix-style with a dizzying club to the head, rather than a spurt of deadly machine gun fire. The books were also notable for the character of Natalia Vengrovska, a Soviet commissar hell-bent on catching her Finnish nemeses, but also struggling with her romantic feelings towards Ryhmy. This femme fatale was obviously a part that Kirsti Hurme was born to play, as indeed she did in the second film, all previous casting as the Colonel’s daughter forgotten. The second film, however, Yes and Right Away (1943) managed to fall foul of the censors in both Helsinki and Moscow, who objected, each for their own reasons, for the portrayal of Russian soldiers as harmless idiots. A similar blight afflicted the original novels, many of which were withdrawn from Finnish libraries, in spite of their popularity, because they presented the Soviet enemy as buffoons, and not a foe to be feared.

Lifting some plots and ideas from the second novel in the series, Ryhmy and Romppainen can be quite confusing – the press of the day singling out the need for the audience to fill in several gaps in the narrative themselves, otherwise it made no sense. The smoldering Kirsti Hurme is wasted in her role as the colonel’s cloaked and usually clueless daughter, and there are some frankly unnecessary bits of business with a pointless pet that just drag out 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.

Aku Karpala (Aku Korhonen) is a super-efficient, polyglot concierge at the high-end Hotel Lyx, who prides himself on always making his customers’ stays go perfectly. He is just preparing for a holiday of his own, when he is approached by “Birgit Gyllencrantz” (Ansa Ikonen), who claims to be a wealthy heiress in need of a chaperone. Birgit is in the market for a husband, but having been raised as an orphan by prim aunts in Porvoo, she confesses to being clueless about the world. It would really help if Aku could come along with, pose as her father, and vet any potential suitors in order to filter out the gold-diggers.

Setting aside for a moment, the truth apparently universally acknowledged that potential suitors will throw themselves at Ansa Ikonen, as if shot out of a cannon, the moment she walks into a room, the pair set out, missing the bus and hitching a lift in the open-top car of the dashing Klaus Lang (Turo Kartto), to whom the giddy Birgit takes an immediate shine.

At the Honkaharju hotel, Aku takes his chaperoning far more seriously than Birgit expected, leading her and Klaus to give him the slip so they can canoodle in private. This rather foils Aku’s plan, as he thinks he has found the perfect match for Birgit in the form of the good-hearted Erkki (Joel Rinne), an engineer.

In fact, Klaus really is a gold-digger, and is only after Birgit’s money, a fact he confesses to his real girlfriend, Mirja (Sylvi Palo), within earshot of the scandalised Aku. But Aku himself has to think fast, when he realises that a fellow guest at the hotel is none other than the formidable Mrs Andersson (Siiri Angerkoski) a gruff widow and regular at the Hotel Lyx, who always makes his life a misery, and will be sure to see through his disguise. She is sure that she knows him from somewhere, but can’t quite place him, leading her to be far kinder to him than usual, and culminating in the couple going off for a romantic ride on a one-horse open sleigh.

After a series of confrontations, Birgit checks out of the hotel after paying Aku’s bill, and on the advice of an angry Klaus, Aku returns home and looks through the 9th January issue of the newspaper Uusi Suomi. There, he finds a report of a Porvoo typist, Pirkko Kyllinen, who has become a millionaire after winning the national lottery. Realising that Birgit has been Pirkko all along, Aku tracks her down, brings her to Helsinki, and arranges a reunion with Erkki, who always wanted a normal girl, but common to Finnish farces, is super-pleased that he has also lucked into one that’s now filthy rich.

A closing coda finds a conspicuously flirty Widow Andersson checking back into the Hotel Lyx, and making it known to Aku that she would like to have dinner with him – it’s not like the pair of them haven’t proved to be made for each other in numerous previous films, including Lapatossu, The Heath Cobblers, and SF Parade. Maybe it would be a good time for Aku to lose his ridiculous Hitler moustache, which is one of the items that really dates this film.

The newspapers in Helsinki and Tampere thought that the film was fresh and fun, gently avoiding any mention of the damage done to it in post-production by the onset of the Continuation War, which cost it a composer lost to the draft. The fact that WW2 was underway already during filming supplies one of the film’s little asides, as Aku finds himself serving a British customer and a German customer at the same time, and wisecracks: “Auch wir Finnen können doch bisweilen Diplomaten sein!” [We Finns can sometimes be diplomats, too!] in one of the multiple languages he is seen to speak on screen. Wartime austerity features in the script itself, in the form of a bus that runs on wood chippings, and multiple references to ration books and a song about the Public Welfare Board. It also has some lovely little touches, not the least a cameo by the strikingly beautiful Maj-Len Helin, a multiple champion figure skater who adds a touch of mini-skirted pizzazz to scenes at the ice rink – why on Earth was this her only film…?

In general, the critics seemed to agree that many involved in the film were entirely blameless, including the ever-reliable Aku Korhonen in the leading role – I particularly enjoyed his fussy inability to be a guest at the Hotel Honkaharju, constantly micro-correcting potted plants and foyer arrangements as any good concierge would. Nor did the critics single out Suomen Filmiteollisuus’ first-time director, the former documentarian Hannu Leminen. Instead, any brickbats were aimed firmly at the script itself, which had been written by actor Turo Kartto, who also played Klaus, and claimed to have based his story on an unidentified French farce. Toini Aaltonen in Suomen Sosialidemokratti, always one to note the money-grubbing nature of so many Finnish comedies, found that Kartto’s script failed to “surprise the viewer with any surprises or unique flashes of thought.” You would think that Uusi Suomi, after being a plot point on the film itself, would be a soft touch in the reviews, but far from it. Instead, it made an inevitable joke based on the Finnish title Täysosuma: “Bullseye fails to hit the bullseye,” wrote the paper’s reviewer MV. “It’s not that it went to the side of the goal or over it, but it never even reached it. It’s just too slow.”

In fact, the film contained several technical innovations that largely passed the general viewer by, including a stuntman standing in for Korhonen in skiing scenes, and new recording equipment that led director Leminen to indulge some of the cast’s improvisations and interjections, adding to a naturalistic feel to the dialogue and several charming moments in which off-the-cuff ad-libs are left in the final cut. At one point, Korhonen even seems to break the fourth wall, staring directly into the camera as he laments his fate. An original approach to graphics characterised the opening titles, with credits depicted as scattered labels on suitcases, and the actors introduced with full-screen portraits. And for some reason, there is a dance interlude later in the film which is supposed to be a ballet about snowmen, but comes across as ridiculously creepy, and looks on occasion like xenomorphic eggs from Alien about to leap out and hug your face.

There was also a remarkable amount of location footage of the cast larking about in the snow – a welcome change from the many Finnish farces that bear the legacy production values of a single set in a theatre. If anything risked defeating the production it was the unseasonably warm weather in Kulosaari, which melted all the snow, requiring the production staff to bring more in by the truckful to complete their shots of a supposed winter wonderland.

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

Everybody in the rival lands of Kalevala and Pohjola wants the sampo – a magical mill that can be set to put out grain, or salt, or gold. But to make it, one requires a series of magical ingredients. Louhi (Anna Orochko), the wicked witch of the North, thinks she has all the gubbins, but still requires the skill of the master-smith Ilmarinen (Ivan Voronov). In order to lure Ilmarinen to her lair, Louhi kidnaps Ilmarinen’s sister Annikki (Eve Kivi), locking her beneath “a hill of copper”. Ilmarinen and Annikki’s would-be husband Lemminkäinen (Andris Osins), take the advice of the bard-wizard Väinämoinen (Urho Somersalmi), and build a magic boat to get them to the north.

Louhi, however, has a bunch of tasks for them to fulfil, including ploughing a field full of vipers, and forging a sampo for her, before she is prepared to release Annikki. Realising that Louhi intends to monopolise the sampo’s bounty for herself, Lemminkäinen returns to the north to steal it back, returning with a small piece that sort of works.

The angry Louhi gatecrashes the wedding of Lemminkäinen and Annikki to steal the sun itself from Kalevala, locking it back in her mountain fortress. Ilmarinen starts work on a new sun (he’s a sort of mythical MacGuyver), but Väinämoinen argues that the coming battle will be fought not with swords, but with songs, demanding that Ilmarinen knock him up a magic kantele to win the culture wars.

In the final confrontation, Väinämoinen’s song puts Louhi’s troll army to sleep, and Louhi herself is eventually turned to stone. Lemminkäinen smashes open the mountain fortress, and frees the sun to shine down on Finland for, well, at least a couple of months a year, it turns out.

This real-time blog of Finnish film history shouldn’t get around to Alexandr Ptushko’s 1959 epic for several years. But it screened on Finnish television on Kalevala Day in February 2024, leading two readers of this blog to immediately complain that I hadn’t covered it. I was mainly shocked that this blog had two whole readers, but immediately put it next on the watch-list, greatly aided by the fact that the Elonet website not only had the film in its entirety, but a set of built-in English subtitles.

I say I saw the film, but I saw a version of it. Sampo was shot in four different editions, Finnish and Russian, standard and anamorphic. It also exists in a hacked-up American edit called The Day the Earth Froze, about which the less said the better.

The most fantastic, goose-bumpy moment in this fantasy film begins with the opening credits, as Suomi-Filmi, the long-standing Finnish film company, shares the title logo with the Soviet Union’s Mosfilms. This international co-production is an amazing sight to see, considering the Finnish film industry’s long-standing antipathy for all things Russian. Now, we have Lenin’s real-life god-daughter, Anna Orochko, done up like Bob Hope in drag to play the baddy, facing up against a scattering of actors from Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries (two Lithuanians and an Estonian), along with the lone Finn, Urho Somersalmi, from Those Golden Days of Yore.

There had been multiple discussions of the possibility of a film based on Elias Lönnröt’s epic poem, but the decision to embark upon this fragment as an international co-production began life in earnest in 1956, when a Finnish film week in Moscow put producers from both countries in the same room with enough vodka to make the Cold War go away. Shooting on location in Finnish beauty spots began in 1957, before production moved to the Soviet Union for the studio work. A few Soviet locations do sneak in, and would strike a discordant note with critics who were thrilling to the sight of Finnish legend in its natural habitat, and didn’t like the occasional interpolation of Ukrainian scenery (a similar fudge rather ruined The House of Flying Daggers for me).

But it was misleading to get too excited about the sight of Finnish myth “re-enacted” in Punkaharju, Kemijärvi and Kuusamo when much of Lönnröt’s material was collected on what is now the other side of the border, in what is now Russian Karelia. This, of course, was why the Soviets were so enthusiastic about making this movie in the first place, because while the Finns were braying about their epic “Finnish” movie, the Soviet press was lauding it as a celebration of “Russian” legend. One of the authentic Finnish locations was, for example, Petrozavodsk, which was only Finnish for a brief time in the Continuation War, before the Russians snatched it back. It was a town in what was then the Soviet Republic of Karelia, where Finnish remained a recognised language up until the 1980s.

For the Finnish press, the film was probably more exciting in prospect than on release. While it was underway, with a budget multiple times higher than the average Finnish movie of the day, with a film crew cropping up all around Finland, there was much to speculate about. When it finally arrived, many critics were underwhelmed by the po-faced, ciphered nature of the characters, most of whom were just clothes horses to hang some speeches on. To be fair, as Heikki Eteläpäa conceded in the Ilta Sanomat, that was really a failing of the original poems, and not really something that could be blamed on the movie.

Lönnröt’s original is also to blame for the haphazard storytelling, which, as noted by Ilkka Juonala in Aamulehti, resulted in a film that “seemed to end at one point, only to start again from the beginning.” And indeed, it’s basically all done in the first 60 minutes, only for Louhi’s return to steal the sun to kick it all off again.

For the Finnish critics, and indeed for audiences today, the lingering appeal of Sampo lies in occasional glimpses of fantasy coming to life. Annikki interrogates literal wind-bags, chained in the fortress where Louhi has stolen the spirits of the various breezes. Lemminkäinen’s mother nonchalantly walks on water as she searches for her son by the side of a lake. Louhi’s cloak flies with its own power, transforming into the sail that drags Annikki’s boat away to captivity. Ilmarinen forges a red horse that will help him and Lemminkäinen plough a field of vipers. Every now and then, there is a moment, a costume, a tableau that recalls the paintings of Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and repeatedly, the characters squabble and bicker before a real Finnish landscape, as alive with lakes and trees as the Kalevala itself, and no less magical.

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

Impoverished artist Lasse Kimalainen (Leo Lähteenmäki) discovers that he is due to inherit millions from an Australian relative, so long as he has a job, a wife and an heir. Unfortunately for him, the letter telling him this has been delayed by the Winter War, leaving him only seven days to fulfil the conditions or forfeit everything to the Kompura family, a trio of ghastly harridans in eye-scorching pinstripes and checks, like a bunch of angry deckchairs. To add even more drama, Lasse’s friend Jopi (Joel Rinne), a picture framer, has accidentally framed the late Aunt Emilia’s last will and testament into one of his recent jobs, causing the two men to embark upon a frantic cruise of Helsinki offices and parlors in an attempt to retrieve it.

Since Jopi’s job primarily comprises framing pictures of celebrities, the quest creates a series of seditious scenes of two young men vandalising photographs of real-life Suomen Filmiteollisuus movie stars, some of whom even appear in this film as members of the cast. Along the way, they stop to attempt to adopt a baby from an orphanage, and to flirt with a pretty young dentist, but much of the comedy comes from the double-entendres and quirky juxtaposition of real-name stars with acts of violence, since “checking” each picture for a document inevitably involves punching an image of a famous personality in the face.

Napoleon (the infant Seppo Ellenberg), for that is the unlikely name of their orphan acquisition, is delivered to their house, and somehow ends up with them and Marja the dentist (Sirkka Sipilä) on a boat where the boys are attempting rip the back off [a picture of] Regina Linnanheimo. Marja is charmed by Napoleon, but appalled by the two men, who jocularly claim to be the boy’s “mother and father.”

In Porvoo, where the ship docks, Jopi gets a job as a waiter at a hotel conveniently owned by Marja’s father Iivari (Toppo Elonperä, the real-life uncle of Ellenberg). He falls swiftly in love with the perky waitress Liisa (Annakaarina), while failing to reveal that some of his odd behaviours are because he is desperate to find and get inside [a picture of] Jalmari Rinne.

With increasing desperation, the boys return to Helsinki to variously bust [a picture of] Eino Kaipainen out of jail, rescue [a picture of] Laila Rihte from the clutches of a bunch of firemen, and liberate [a picture of] Elsa Rantalainen from the shooting range at a carnival. Eventually, the missing will is discovered stuffed inside [a picture of] the lovely Ester Toivonen, and after a Jules Verne-influenced confusion about the time, the boys realise that they have fulfilled the conditions, and the fortune is theirs, along with a dentist and a waitress as their respective brides.

Many of the Finnish press, grateful for a comedy as Finland lumbered into the Continuation War with the Soviet Union, praised the film for its resemblance to American “screwball” movies of the era, singling out the obvious but entertaining wordplay buried in the script – your mileage may vary, but I am giggling like a naughty schoolboy even as I type out the synopsis. Only Olavi Vesterdahl of Aamulehti was underwhelmed, grimly writing: “Poikamies pappa would have certainly been a lively and amusing film if the topic had been handled differently – as in, with intelligence and humour rather than banal comedy and pranks.”

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

Leila Roine (Lea Joutseno) is shortly to marry her engineer fiancé Lauri Honkatie (Tauno Majuri), and so is conducting the traditional ceremonies of a 1940s Finnish bride-to-be, which apparently includes feeding letters and photographs connected to her former boyfriends into the fireplace. But as she confesses to cousin Mirjami (Kaija Rahola), arriving for the nuptials, she still carries a torch for Esko (Olavi Reimas), an impoverished poet.

Meanwhile, Lauri is fighting off his ex Asta (Hanna Taini), who arrives at his house to plead with him not to marry Leila, but instead to run away with her. The much-missed Esko shows up at Leila’s to present her with a poetry collection dedicated to her, and makes a similar offer to elope.

So, both bride and groom are facing last-minute temptations, but each of them nobly resists. Leila politely declines Esko’s offer, and they part as friends, but is then subject to an elaborate deception by Asta, who persuades her that she and Lauri are not only still an item, but actually betrothed. Mirjami can’t talk her out of it (because Mirjami has been tied to a chair), and Leila gets the wrong end of the stick when she calls a hotel and hears that Lauri is scandalously there…. Although in truth he is innocently lunching with his mother.

With all the parties eventually checked into the same hotel, a series of misunderstandings soon ensue. Lauri befriends Esko, and confides in him about the inconstancies of women, unaware that Esko has been busily trying to get inconstant with his fiancée. With everything liable to fall apart, the Roine family housekeeper Salli (Hilppa Ilvos) helps matters along by enlisting a bunch of kids to let off smoke bombs, propelling everybody into the arms of their correctly mandated future-spouse, including Esko and Mirjami, who have fallen for each other.

Morsian yllättää was the first collaboration between director Valentin Vaala, writer Kersti Bergroth (of Rich Girl fame), and actress Lea Joutseno, who is credited in some quarters as a co-writer – one suspects that modern-day writer’s union rules might prefer to credit her as an executive producer, since saying “What about a farce where everybody gets confused in a hotel?” hardly constitutes an “original” idea. Whatever was done by whoever, this triumvirate of Finnish film movers and shakers would go on to make several more comedies in the 1940s, including With Serious Intent (Tositarkoituksella, 1943) and The Girl and the Gangsters (Dynamiittityttö, 1944).

Shot largely on studio sets to escape the winter of 1941, and hence replicating many of the tropes and set-ups of a dozen other farces that had originally been written for the stage, the film was damned with faint praise in Uusi Suomi, the reviewer for which deemed it “harmless” and mercifully lacking in any actual surprises. Toini Aaltonen in the Suomen Sosialidemokraati instead distinguished something more enduring: a lightness of tone and snappiness of naturalistic dialogue that made it more than the sum of its parts. Paula Talaskivi, the only Finnish 1940s critic whose opinion really counts for posterity, called it a “cheerful frolic” and praised it for what she saw as its “piquant note of parody” – in other words, she saw it not as yet another farce, but a commentary on all the others.

Posterity has brought a mixed memory. Aune Kämäräinen in Uusi Suomi in 1980 commented on its TV broadcast that “we no longer laugh at the same things today as we did in 1941”, nevertheless pleading its case as a shining example of a particular kind of film that needed to be appreciated in its historical context. Other contemporary critics have been similarly forgiving, with Tapani Maskula in the Turun Sanomat noting that Joutseno’s star power gave Hollywood screwball comedies a run for their money, and Pertti Avolakin in the Helsingin Sanomat observing that modern viewers truly needed to appreciate that this was a comedy made in wartime (or its immediate aftermath) specifically to distract and entertain the women of the home front.

One of the little rascals with smoke bombs was played by Kalevi Koski, previously seen in The Man from Sysmä (1938). He would leave child-acting behind to become an orthodontist and professor of dentistry, becoming the first person in Finnish academia to write his thesis in English.

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

After the police raid her workplace for selling contraband goods, secretary Jutta Laakso (Birgit Konström) walks out on her feckless boss and into the street, where she runs into her friend Erkka (Kullervo Kalske), a journalist on his way to a party. Tagging along, Jutta manages to convince the rich party-goers of the Suurmetso family that she is a cultured noblewoman, and snags a job at their company.

But Jutta is actually the child of a theatrical family, whose attention-hungry mother and siblings are soon descending on the Suurmetso home, causing utter chaos, and leading to a series of misunderstandings and coincidences that lead to the ambassador’s orchestra performing for a party in the wrong building, and a government inspector locked in the bathroom after he threatens to confiscate the actors’ “borrowed” set materials. The kind-hearted Mr Suurmetso (Tauno Majuri) takes pity on his wayward secretary, and helps her family set up a new ballet production, The Emperor’s New Points, which riffs on the old Hans Christian Andersen tale in a setting of wartime rationing.

By the end, Jutta and Erkka have realised they have feelings for each other, and Mr Suurmetso has fallen for Jutta’s stepsister, the singer Sointu (Tuire Orri), in a light-hearted riff on Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take it With You (1938), that also rips a page from the playbook of the previous year’s SF Parade (1940), cramming in so much song and dance that the play-within-a-play takes up a quarter of the whole film.

The Finnish press was forgiving of a movie that existed purely as a hanger to hold up a series of song and dance numbers, noting that whatever it was that Poretta thought it was doing, it was doing it well. Even when Kullervo Kalske is asking Birgit Konström what time it is, they are doing it as a song, although this is very much Konström’s film, while Kalske’s stellar good looks are somewhat crammed into the shadows, hidden behind a moustache and framed repeatedly as if he just some guy who has wandered in, and not the Most Handsome Man in Finland.

If you happen to come from a family of actors (and don’t get me started…), then many of the moments in Poretta will be familiar torments – none of the cast can walk past a piano, or a parrot, or a silly hat without diving in and turning it into a performance. The script, credited to Elsa Soini and Seere Salminen of The Suominen Family (1941), along with director Ilmari Unho, is sweetly indulgent of thespians, portraying them as much needed carnival sorts, driving through everyday life like a clown-car of holy fools, brightening the days of normal people with all their singing, dancing and folksy wisdom.

There were vague complaints from the critics that the final performance went on for a bit too long, but then again, 1941 audiences were somewhat dazzled by the closing “under the sea” dance number, filmed with a graphic overlay of bubbles and passing goldfish to add a sense of submarine fun. Everybody seems to be trying a little too hard to enjoy themselves in a pastiche of Busby Berkeley musicals, but that was the inter-war tension that got Poretta into production in the first place, and it seems churlish to criticise it for trying to have a moment of joy in troubled times.

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

1853/4: Regina Berg (Regina Linnanheimo) is an orphaned fisherman’s daughter who lives in Kaivopuisto, once nothing more than a pokey workman’s village, now the lynchpin of aristocratic Helsinki, a massive swathe of seaside parkland ringed by new villas and mansions. As a sometime delivery girl and flower seller, she is thrown into the lives of the nobles, specifically the entourage of the Russian princess Kristina Popoff (a welcome return from Ester Toivonen, absent from the screen since 1940’s Tenant Farmer’s Girl), who descends each summer on the “Finnish Riviera” to escape from St Petersburg. Regina is a hit with the serving girls at the manor, one of whom even shows her around the areas above-stairs.

In a twist knowingly redolent of Cinderella, Regina purloins some of Kristina’s clothes in order to sneak into a ball at her mansion, where she flirts with Kristina’s cousin Engelbert (Tauno Palo), a member of the Chevalier Guard, winning his affections and losing a golden shoe as she flees the venue. The mystery is swiftly solved after Kristina interrogates the servants, but Engelbert refuses to return the shoe unless its wearer comes to see him in person. He waits for three nights on the coast, and although Regina eventually arrives, she in turn refuses to accept any gifts from him unless he has honourable intentions.

After Engelbert tries to grab her, Regina returns home without her dress, leading her own family to suspect the worst and forbid her from any further dealings with the aristocrats. Engelbert’s lieutenant Ontrei (Unto Salminen), who helped Kristina escape from his clutches, takes the opportunity to confess his own feelings for her, and after spectacularly failing to read the room, offers to set her up as his own mistress in a Karelian love-nest.

On the eve of the Crimean War, Engelbert apologises for his crass behaviour and woos Regina for real, and the uncomplaining Ontrei drives them both to a nearby chapel, where Engelbert presents her with a wedding ring as a sign of his true love. He even suggests eloping to Stockholm, but Regina continues to refuse to do anything untoward. Engelbert heads off to war, and Kristina takes Regina under her wing, arranging for her to learn the manners and customs of the aristocracy. She even throws a Christmas ball to take Regina mind off her absent betrothed, and we see Regina dreaming wistfully of a dance with Engelbert…

…who turns out to have been killed in the Crimea, as remembered by an aged Kristina, now an old woman sitting by his graveside.

The story derived from the novel Kaivopuisto’s Beautiful Elsa (Kaivopuisto kaunis Elsa, 1936), written under the pseudonym of Tuulikki Kallio by Kaarina Kaarna, the wife of the artist, writer and sometime director Kalle Kaarna. Resolutely hanging onto her anonymity through a mail-drop in Tornio, Kaarna had offered the film to both Suomen Filmiteollisuus and its rival studio Suomi Filmi – Risto Orkko at the latter rejecting the deal on the grounds that filming an epic period drama in modern Helsinki would be prohibitively expensive.

No such qualms bothered Toivo Särkkä at Suomen Filmiteollisuus, who enthusiastically shot location work in the real-world Kaivopuisto, where even today a judiciously placed camera and a bit of concealing foliage can create a reasonable evocation of the 19th century. Actor Tauno Palo reported standing in Kaivopuisto, dressed in the uniform of one of the Tsar’s elite Chevalier Guards, only to find himself face-to-face with Gustaf Mannerheim, commander in chief of the Finnish armed forces. Mannerheim had himself been a Chevalier Guard in his youth, and regarded Palo quizzically, as if encountering a ghost from the past. Perhaps he had noticed that Palo’s costume neglected the historically accurate chamois leather pants of a Guard, which famously were so tight that they had be dragged on wet.

Filmed in the dying days of the summer of 1940, the story was renamed to reflect the big-name casting of Linnanheimo as the star – a rebranding so powerful as to lead to later editions of the book to be similarly altered. This blog has often asserted its disbelief that Linnanheimo was a star at all – to modern eyes, she often comes across as out-of-place as her contemporary Gracie Fields – but in the dour 1940s, ironically, she had finally learned how to smile.

Writer-director Toivo Särkkä was responsible for the shock ending, which deliberately disrupted the happy betrothal that closed the original with a bitter twist that only endeared the film even more to audiences reeling from the Winter War. The film is also fascinating for its treatment of sexual assault – not unlike the fierce Russian brute in The Great Wrath (1939), Engelbert assumes that Regina is his for the taking, that his interest in her is enough to justify her acquiescence. It’s something of a shock when he starts grabbing at her, and the camera lingers deliberately on her distress and denial, until her clothes come off and she (actually her body double) flees naked up the stairs. True to its setting, the film remains non-judgmental of Engelbert’s double standards, celebrating his ability to finally remember his manners, rather than damning him for not having any in the first place. Possibly, there is a nuance I haven’t noticed – that Engelbert has been somehow corrupted by Russian ways in St Petersburg, and needs to be reminded by a Finn of how a lady should be treated?

The film was the second-biggest box office hit of the year (beaten only by The Vagabond’s Waltz), the first Finnish movie to be exhibited at the Venice Film Festival, and exported to several other countries. Paula Talaskivi, in the Helsingin Sanomat, articulated what everybody else was thinking, that the number-one film had been so entertaining that its thematic follow-up could only be a disappointment, and that despite the largesse lavished on grand set pieces, the realistically verbose 1850s dialogue was wearing after a while. Toini Aaltonen in Suomen Sosialidemokraati agreed, noting that while it was okay on the surface, it was “half-hearted and naïve” in its inner soul. “But the saddest thing,” he wrote, “is the infinite, unrelenting cuteness of this movie story, which towards the end begins to be downright boring. After watching it, you definitely have the desire to bite on something salty.”

The critics have a point, but the ending stabs like a knife as it segues from the opulent dance sequence into the lone sight of Regina in the graveyard – the picture I share here is taken from an angle to the side of the filming, not the one which had Engelbert’s name added to the front of the tomb. It prefigures a similar juxtaposition of abundance and loss at the end of Alexander Sokurov’s The Russian Ark (2002), an entire world destroyed in the first half of the twentieth century, and surely all too real and raw for many in the 1941 audience. Sure, the film is twee and the story is ludicrous, but Särkkä’s final sequence hammers home the way in which war is the death of romance.

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

Commissioner Puosu (Hugo Hytönen) and the journalist Harni (Hannes Häyrinen) become reluctant partners as they try to solve the murder case of Nelly, a smuggler found dead in the Helsinki apartment where Harni had been the last… or presumably second-to-last person to see her alive. Their investigations plunge them into the middle of a menagerie of black-market spivs and shysters, many of whom might have had a motive or opportunity for offing their sometime supplier of contraband goods.

Puoso thinks he has uncovered the murderer – the shopkeeper Herttamo (Eino Jurkka), whose kerchief matches a thread found on the victim, but Herttamo is himself murdered on a train. It transpires that Nelly’s murder is the latest iteration of a decade-long drama unfurling from a bank robbery ten years earlier, as its survivors seek to cover their tracks and preserve their identities in hiding. Of particular note here is Irma Seikkula, star of Juurakon Hulda (1937), in the role of Ane, a seemingly unimportant secretary who turns out to be the daughter of a cashier killed in the robbery, whose subsequent life has been steered by a series of anonymous donations from the criminals.

Well, that escalated quickly. After years of shonky adaptations of repertory theatre-plays, unfunny sitcoms and musty old children’s books, Suomi-Filmi suddenly explode into the 1940s with an up-to-date thriller, drawing on H. R. Halli’s novel And the Murders Continued (1939, Yhä murhat jatkuivat). The original was set in Finland’s post-WW1 Prohibition era, but had a subject matter that lent itself well to being upgraded to a contemporary thriller in the wake of the Winter War.

And the critics went wild for it. Only a few days after they had been eviscerating The Solemn Hornblower for wasting literally everybody’s time and money, the Finnish press piled on with unbridled enthusiasm to welcome the dawning of a new and noirish age.

Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti was fulsome in praise for “Finland’s first home-made detective film,” thrilling to its shadowy lighting and the “pleasant surprise” of its thriller narrative. Toini Aaltonen in Suomen Sosialidemokraati called it “exciting and fast-paced” and dared to suggest that it gave Hollywood a run for its money. The final level boss of any Finnish film’s critical response, Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat, was delighted by its impressive photography and naturalistic dialogue, and if she had any objections, it was to a somewhat muddled plot that came apart at the seams as the film went on, for which she was happy to lay the blame at the feet of the source novel, and not the film company that adapted it.

Posterity is not quite so kind – something that is repeatedly noticeable about Talaskivi’s reviews is how accurately they can predict the long view of a film. She is rarely caught up in the moment, but has a concision of appreciation and a frankly prophetic sense of how something like The Last Guest would be viewed not merely years, but decades after its premiere.

It’s worth mentioning that despite the enthusiasm of the critics of 1941, Finnish audiences were plainly not ready for such a kick up the creative arse. Box office receipts were below average for the film, which took two years to recoup its production costs. Co-director Arvi Tuome would not helm another film again, although his collaborator Ville Salminen, who also designed the sets and appeared in the role of the suspicious wholesaler Rajapalo, would be back in front of the camera before long, and behind it once more in the 1950s. I also find it interesting that none of the press stills preserved in the archives really showcase the film’s best and most creative camerawork. Suomi-Filmi’s photographers came up with the usual shots of men sitting in rooms and women about to be snogged, whereas Tuome and Salminen’s much-praised framing was not documented by their own studio. To get that shot of the man on the staircase that adorns this review, I had to do a screen grab from the film itself – an interesting aside in terms of the materials available for the discussion of historical media.

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

On his way to the engineers’ club masquerade ball, Volmari (Leo Lahteenmäki) wanders into a deserted museum and is locked inside. Spooking the janitor, he escapes into the street wearing a suit of armour, where he is arrested by the police, who think he is Armand (Lauri Kyöstilä), a trumpet player from the circus, who is out on a drunken binge while also inexplicably wearing a suit of armour.

Purportedly “high” jinks ensue, as a man in a suit of armour who may or may not be Volmari, cavorts on the dancefloor with Volmari’s would-be girlfriend Raili (Laila Rihte), only to be fondled by Bertha (Siiri Angerkoski), the circus’s singer, who wants “Armand” for herself. The armour turns into the film’s McGuffin, with Armand brow-beaten into handing his own suit “back” to the museum, while Volmari has to buy his own suit back to sneak it back into the museum, only to freak out when he finds Armand’s suit has already been “returned” in its place.

This blog has noted before how unfunny the “comedies” of Agapetus can be, and it seems that the Finns were finally bold enough to mention this themselves. Leading man Lahteenmäki himself would later describe it as a childish “emergency” project designed to fill cinemas in wartime, and Toini Aaltonen in Suomen Sosiaaldemokraati archly praised Suomen Filmiteollisuus for “adding to the number of bad Finnish films.” Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti warned that Finnish cinema might be approaching an unsustainable tipping point of disappointed audiences, and that Tottinen Torvensoittaja was so bad it was almost impossible to review, “a pointless, aimless meander, with a hard-to-see plot and almost nothing worth watching.” The press reserved particular ire for the closing dream sequence, which numerous journalists familiar with the original 1933 novel correctly identified as nothing but filler designed to bulk out a script that had jettisoned an earlier part of the story – a boat trip that was presumably discarded due to the likely expense.

When shown on Finnish television in 1992, Antti Lindkvist in Katso magazine derided it as “a completely thoughtless car-crash that belongs among the weakest products of Finnish cinema.” Yes, Antti, but did you like it?

Remarkably, none of the reviewers seem to have mentioned the thing that renders this film truly toxic to modern audiences. The use of the term “black” (mustalainen) to mean “gipsy” in Finnish also rather obscures what I suspect to be the real reason for the absence of this film from the online Elonet repository – Siiri Angerkoski is not playing a gipsy, but a negro singer in outrageous blackface make-up, which might have been all right in Finland in 1941, but cause for torches and pitchforks outside the cinema today.

This is the last Finnish film to bear the name of Kaarlo Kartio in the credits; he was supposed to play Armand, but died before filming could commence, although presumably the credits were already printed and nobody could be bothered to change them.

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

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.