Evacuated from the city of Viipuri, recently lost to Russia in the war, Valle (Arvo Lehesmaa) sets up a musical group with his old war buddies Nalle (Leo Lähtenmäki) and Jalmar (Martti Lohikoski). The boys are soon thrown into the company of a trio of fun-loving office ladies, who unwittingly drag them into a series of misunderstandings about a valuable fox-fur scarf that comes into their possession. Eventually, all’s well that ends well, three couples find love, but the women dutifully donate their engagement rings to the Finnish war effort, since every little helps.

Released in the last week of 1940 and not making it to many provincial theatres until the following spring, Ketunhäntä Kainulossa rounds up a bunch of B-list actors, overlooked by the Suomi-Filmi and Suomen Filmiteollisuus studios. Leading ladies Mirjami Kuosmanen and Aune Häme, for example, had only managed bit-parts in films for the majors, while Aino Angerkoski might have a familiar surname, but only because the recently deceased star Kaarlo Angerkoski was her brother. All gamely throw themselves into a farce that tries to make light of the war raging just outside – famously, Finland had banned dancing during the Winter War as a mark of respect to the hardships on the frontline, and the jazzy, toe-tapping resumption of fun times seen here would soon be repealed again when hostilities resumed. As a result, the cast desperately try to cram in as much singing and dancing as they can, from impromptu a cappella singalongs on apartment stairwells, to a full-on variety show that bulks out the running time in the last reel.

The film’s odd title derives from a Finnish slang term – a foxtail in the armpit, not unlike a wolf in sheep’s clothing, denotes a wily predator trying to pass himself off as something he is not. In this case, it refers to a folktale about a fox trying to pass as human by cramming itself into an overcoat, only for its tail to poke out, giving it away. It is also the title of one of the many songs sung during the course of the film – in this case, at a bizarre masked ball that the cast attends, and where people throw paper streamers in an attempt to make things more interesting. The song is reprised at the end in a song-and-dance number in which Lähteenmäki is surrounded by a bunch of lissome Finnish girls in hotpants, so life could be worse.

The film was written to order by Reino “Palle” Hirviseppä, a prominent radio scenarist hired to dash something off to capitalise on the armistice. His revue-style caper (compare to the contemporary S-F Paraati and the same company’s earlier Kaksi Vihtoria), throwing together a bunch of stock characters better known from Finnish radio, often lumbers towards incomprehensibility when divorced from the memes and call-backs of its original era. Hirviseppä openly feuded with director Blomberg over liberties taken with his script – rushed into production so fast there was no time to wait to shoot planned summer scenes, losing most of the first-choice cast to also-rans, and a bunch of rewrites that he regarded as ruinous. He would later comment that the premiere at the Helsinki Savoy was an unmitigated disaster, and that he was ashamed to be present. Audiences agreed, in a year for which cinema attendance was already in a slump – this was the fifth and last film for the production company Eloseppä, and its box-office failure caused the cancellation of the planned follow-up, Singing Cinderella (Laulava Tuhkimo).

The Helsingin Sanomat was unimpressed, with movie critic Paula Talaskivi archly noting that a movie billing itself as the “funniest Finnish movie of all time” failed to elicit a single chuckle in the cinema. Instead, she found it to be “the saddest thing imaginable,” betraying the audience’s trust by committing the most unforgiveable crime for any comedy: being boring. Olavi Vesterdahl was similarly damning in Tampere’s Aamulehti, berating the film for even bothering to staple its song-dance routines together with such a flimsy plot. The Swedish-language press commentary is beyond me, but I cannot resist sharing the Google translation of the review in Hufvudstadsbladet, which reads: “”This is an insertion for the whole of the landfill and the landfill of the landfill. However, the number of landfills used is not open to the public from the operative coupling of the ramp.” Say what you mean, Sweden.

Critics were more easily swayed in the Finnish provinces, where the Savo Sanomat called it a veritable “herring salad” (sillisalaatti – this is apparently a good thing if you come from Savo), and commented: “There’s such a vibrancy and momentum in the movie, so that no one sleeps at all while watching it. In places, the film touches such limits of respectability that it should be categorically kept from children.”

Two years later, director Erik Blomberg would marry leading actress Mirjami Kuosmanen, so I suppose someone found it raunchy enough outside Savo. Hirviseppä and Blomberg, however, never spoke to each other again, and were still bitter about the whole thing in interviews four decades later.

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

Hard-up student Inkeri (Helena Kara) wins a trip to That Fancy Stockholm, and in order not to stick out on the ship, borrows some clothes and accessories from her rich friend Kaisu (Lea Joutsena). She does everything she can to attract the attentions of the handsome Taavi Takkulainen (Tauno Majuri) but he is immune to her charms, largely because he recognises her borrowed cigarette case as a Korri family item, and assumes she is an irritating rich girl, as opposed to what she actually is, which is an irritating poor one. After this rather pointless case of mistaken identity, the young couple hit it off, and agree to meet the next day at the Grand Hotel, where Taavi’s brother Albert (Uuno Laakso), the Consul General, also happens to be staying.

In a series of farcical set-ups, betraying the origins of this film in a 1934 theatrical piece by The King of Poetry and the Migratory Bird’s Elsa Soini, everybody manages to miss each other, and someone ends up holding a fur coat like the Prince in Cinderella. Inkeri takes a job at the Takkulainen household, tutoring the family’s youngest son Erkki (Hannes Häyrinen). Confusions continue as the pushy mother of the Takkulainens tries to manoeuvre Inkeri into marrying Albert in order to increase his prospects as an international diplomat. Inkeri is batted between the brothers like a giggly tennis ball, before eventually Taavi wins through, dashing to her hospital room in the belief that she is dead, only to discover that she is perfectly fine and ready to hear his confession of undying love.

All this might sound rather humdrum, and indeed, on its later TV broadcast, the critic Ilkka Juonala rightly dismissed it as “a rather routine Finnish comedy that drives along the same old safe and familiar roads.” But over the Christmas season of 1940, this mediocre farce garnered oodles of praise in the nation’s newspapers. Kauppalehti singled out its “relentless pace”, Uusi Suomi called it “a triumph of cultural comedy” and Aamulehti called it a “fast-paced and funny film.”

As suggested by the fact that the titular consul doesn’t get the girl in the film, the movie version differed substantially from the original play, to the extent of marrying Inkeri off to a different brother. It also adds an entirely new first act – the play took place solely in the Takkulainen office and library, whereas for the film version, writer-director Ilmari Unho throws in that whole Swedish sequence at the beginning, presumably as a means of getting everybody away on a tax-deductible, fur-coat-wearing jolly to Stockholm amid wartime austerity measures. The opening half-hour, in fact, extends the running time to 109 minutes, which made it something of a whopper among many “features” of the era that struggled to make it past the 60-minute mark. Unsurprisingly, it’s the cast’s sly Swedish trip that is the most interesting part of this film, with glimpses of shipboard life before the Stockholm ferry became little more than a karaoke booze-cruise. The bulk of the film, however, was conspicuously shot in Helsinki, with only a few scattered Stockholm exteriors to suggest that the crew even got off the boat.

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 1944, a company of Nazis flee across northern Finland towards the Norwegian border, burning anything they encounter. On the way, they relieve a passing prospector of his saddle bags of newly excavated gold nuggets, unaware that he is Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) a veteran of the Winter War and a fearsome commando. Armed with little more than a pickaxe and legendary Finnish sisu (which is supposedly untranslatable), Korpi hounds the Nazis across the unforgiving terrain.

Director Jalmari Helander’s previous Big Game was an outrageous action movie featuring Samuel L. Jackson as the US president, on the run in Lapland after terrorists bring down Air Force One, and forced to rely on the ingenuity of a teenage Finnish woodsman. But as I said at the time, it was a film about a “Finland of the mind”, shot overseas amid distinctly un-Finnish mountains as if he had no faith in the cinematic appeal of his homeland.

In Sisu, which seems liable to be released in many territories under the title Immortal, Helander returns to gory Hollywood-influenced action. One suspects there is an image board somewhere in his office, crowded with several iconic set pieces from the Indiana Jones films, a few stills from Mad Max: Fury Road and First Blood, and a bunch of old-school war movies and quite possibly the Norwegian Ofelas (a.k.a. Pathfinder). But he also clings to the real Lapland as his location, with Kjell Lagerroos’ cinematography pausing for long, loving vistas of the fells around Utsjoki and Inari, awash with gorgeous autumn colours, in what must have been a punishing shoot to seize each day’s limited light.

As Korpi, leading man Jorma Tommila barely has two lines in the whole film, instead carrying the whole thing through sheer force of grit and will. He is aided by a supporting cast of sufficiently dastardly Nazis (largely played by Finnish actors, but speaking English to help all those foreign cinema-goers, and dying in a number of increasingly visceral and gory ways), some plucky Finnish women, the obligatory dog in danger, and a score by Juri Seppä and Tuomas Wäinölä that steals the high-noon knells of many a Western, and ominous droning that recalls Mongolian throat-singing.

There are some corner-cutting VFX to add widescreen whistles and bells, including shots of Ivalo in flames and a war-torn Helsinki, but aside from Tommila himself and his increasingly ludicrous refusal to give up, the real star is Lapland, which Helander has chronicled before in his breakout Rare Exports, but never with quite so much loving attention.

As for “sisu” itself, the opening credits have a go at defining it: ““SISU on hampaat irvessä pystyyn nostettu nyrkki. Se on sitkeää uhmakkuutta kohtalon edessä. SISU syttyy, kun viimeinenkin toivonkipinä on hiipunut.” Sisu is when you raise your fist with your teeth clenched. It is stubborn defiance in the face of fate. Sisu lights up when the last spark of hope has faded.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. Sisu is what keeps him going back to try terrible Finnish Asian-fusion buffets.

Virtanen (Aku Korhonen) is an aging widower who works as a watchman at the Kuusela textile factory, and dotes on his daughter Aino (Regina Linnanheimo), who is dating the boss’s son Veikko (Unto Salminen). Mr Kuusela warns his son that relationships across class lines rarely work out, but Veikko assures his girlfriend that love will win in the end.

Virtanen surprises a would-be burglar, but lets the man go when he realises he has a family of four to feed. Later that night, he dozes off and has a premonition that Mr Kuusela will be in a car accident. Kuusela laughs it off, but is sufficiently spooked that he decides not to risk driving home drunk from the gentleman’s club. He takes a taxi instead, which probably saves his life, but ashamed of people laughing at his hangover the following day, Kuusela dismisses Virtanen for having clearly been asleep on the job – otherwise, how could he have had a prophetic dream?

Virtanen struggles to find another job, hobbled by his age and the fact he was fired for dereliction of duty. Veikko adds to everybody’s troubles by getting Aino pregnant and then spurning her. Aino runs away, but the womenfolk at the factory band together and threaten strike action unless the Kuusela family rallies around.

Finns have a remarkably odd attitude towards Christmas, and the sharp-eyed observer can see much pagan fatalism lurking in the local festivities, not the least in the local carols, which are mournful dirges about death and despair. So it should come as no surprise that this supposed “Christmas” movie reduces much of its festive spirit to an observation of people fallen on hard times, and a vaguely prosaic Christmas “miracle”, in which the Kuusela family is brought to its senses by a car accident not unlike the one that Virtanen had prophesied. Alone and reading a hefty Bible by candlelight, Virtanen hears carol-singers outside singing “Silent Night.” He has a vision of Aino, arriving at the head of a column of beaming factory girls and her new husband Veikko to assure him that all is well. If this were a Japanese movie, the final shot would show us that Virtanen had died, but instead this turns out to be actually true, and all ends well.

Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti condemned it for “American sentimentality” and its unlikely plot, although let’s be honest here, it’s set at a time of the year when the country celebrates a virgin birth. The left-wing press was more approving of the social message – Aino is a working-class girl poised on the cusp of societal levelling up, almost defeated but somehow winning through, which was a subject that appealed to Toini Aaltonen of the Suomen Sosiaalidemokraatti – it is interesting, in fact, to see what is essentially a plot that ends in tragedy in God’s Judgement (1939), and in defiance in The Child is Mine (1940), here assigned a more conservative and frankly miraculous solution.

Several reviewers noted that the film stood or fell on Aku Korhonen’s performance. The film had, in fact, been written by Erik Dahlberg with Korhonen in mind, and, not for the last time in Finnish film, the casting of a comedian in a melodramatic role pays huge dividends. Only a few weeks earlier, audiences had seen him larking about in Lapatossu & Vinski’s Department Store, and yet here he is, carrying a whole drama on his capable shoulders.

It’s not all doom and gloom: there are a couple of dance interludes, including an elegant performance of “La Cumparsita”, in which dancers Orvokki Siponen and Klaus Salin light up the screen. But even that comes tinged with melancholy, if you know the actual lyrics that accompany the tango classic: “The parade of endless miseries marches around that sick being who will soon die of grief.”

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 something of a structural innovation, Valentin Vaala’s film begins where so many might end, on someone’s wedding day. But all is not as it seems at the nuptials of Kilian (Olavi Reimas) and Elisa (Kaija Rahola), a chain of escalating disasters soon revealed in a series of flashbacks.

Two years earlier, Kilian was a happy-go-lucky philosophy student, forced to retrain as a lawyer after the sinking of a lumber transport placed his father’s business in jeopardy. Putting a brave face on corporate brinkmanship, Kilian is dispatched to a remote region to turn around a small business, only to find a bunch of surly locals who rightly do not trust him. But the good-hearted new trouble-shooter makes friends after saving the life of a young boy, and falls for local girl Hanna (Irma Seikkula). That might have been the beginnings of a happy ending, but Kilian is obliged to marry for money, not love… which brings us back to where we came in, a wedding tinged with tragedy, and just about to be tinged with a load more.

The screenplay for this film was written by Turo Kartto, an actor last seen on this blog being entertainingly dickish as a reluctant British tourist in All Kinds of Guests (1936). He does a nice job hammering Lauri Haarla’s 1937 novel into a movie, to the extent that the TV reviewer in the Helsingin Sanomat a generation later commented that the only thing wrong with it was the occasions where it had to adhere to the “pompous and pathetic” dialogue from the original book. That’s a little economical with the truth – Kaija Rahola sports an utterly ridiculous hat that is liable to be the most memorable thing about this film, while the gorgeous Kirsti Hurme is forced to wear a costume that makes her look like a fondant fancy, and not in a good way.

Haarla purportedly based this 1890s melodrama on an incident from the history of his own extended family, and one gets the sense that its adaptation in 1940 was intended to impart a little allegorical message of the necessity of self-sacrifice on a nation still reeling from the Winter War. The film took several years to earn back the cost of its production, although once the Continuation War was underway, it did get a little boost from being released in Germany, inexplicably with Uuno Klami’s stirring score ripped out and replaced by that of a German composer.

For reasons unknown, the film was premiered in November 1940 not in That Fancy Helsinki, but hundreds of miles to the north in Oulu, despite featuring location work shot on the shores of lake Päijänne in the middle of Finland.

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

Workshy layabouts Lapatossu (Aku Korhonen) and Vinski (Kaarlo Kartio) are reduced to reading recipe books to stave off hunger, when they suddenly find themselves inheriting a department store. They throw themselves into swindling the public by over-charging for material goods instead of their usual hustles, only to be plunged into a price war with Senttinen (Toppo Elonperä), the dastardly owner of the rival store across the street. Senttinen, meanwhile, hopes to seduce the innocent Kirsi (Laila Rihte) a woman who mistakenly believes that her beloved Erkki (Onni Korhonen) has been killed in the war.

The critic for the Helsingin Sanomat was unforgiving – noting that while there was indeed an actual plot, huge chunks of Tavaratalo Lapatossu & Vinski were devoted to bloated comedy sidebars, as well as two pointless musical interludes, common in Finnish film since the late 1930s. This seems a trifle unfair on the Lapatossu franchise, both former instalments of which followed a similar pattern of letting Korhonen and Kaartio steamroller a series of comedy set-ups through the middle of an otherwise gormless romance among the supporting cast.

In fact, it’s the pointless comedy business that supplies the most memorable moments of this film, particularly in the opening reel, as Vinski pleads that they should find some work so they should not go hungry, only for Lapatossu to grimly intone that work is a serious business, as if his companion has just proposed strolling into Mordor. Lapatossu and Vinski capitalise on the locals’ love of lining up for bargains (Finns, as the saying goes, “will stand in line for a free bucket”), by creating a fake queue for a non-existent sale. They then make their way back down the line, selling their places in the queue, before announcing that the “sale” has ended before anyone can get in. Similarly, once they take over the store, they try to tart themselves up as salesman, resulting in a pair of camp toadies like the “Suits-You-Sir” tailors, ably assisted by Jacob Furman (last seen as a tap-dancing telegram boy in SF Parade) and a robot dancing instructor.

Whereas Lapatossu & Vinski in Olympic Fever (1939) clocked in at a surprisingly short running time, this sequel is bulked out by a far more cunning means, stretched to feature length in part by a long, rambling closing speech, as Lapatossu ties up the plot strands and leaves his store to the young couple. Director Toivo Särkkä shoots the whole address in a single take – Lapatossu is giving a prepared speech and so is even permitted a crib sheet in front of him – and tries to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes with occasional cutaways to the crowd plainly filmed at a different time. It’s a clever way to stretch out the film by eight minutes, but it is also a tediously Finnish way of doing so.

After the film’s opening in November 1940, there was a certain degree of excitable trilling in the press about the surname-less newcomer “Annakaarina” (in fact Kaarina Salonoja, who had been previously glimpsed in Have I Arrived in a Harem? and The Culprits? both in 1938), whose Karelian accent was a bit of over-the-border exotica for the Finns, not unlike Catherine Zeta-Jones going full-on Welsh. But despite an electrifying smile and killer cheekbones, she, like her co-star Laila Rihte, is somewhat defeated by frumpy austerity-era fashions and servant headscarves, and it doesn’t help that the script takes her ingénue role to breathless, Bible-thumping extremes. I confess I had a bit of trouble following the Karelian lines, which sounds like Finnish put through an Estonian wringer, but clearly the cast have much the same problem, too, with Vinski reduced to smiling and nodding at some of Hilma’s weirder vocabulary. The sudden presence of Karelian accents in Finland, of course, was a matter of some contemporary notice, with so many refugees from east Finland flooding into the country – a phenomenon also referenced in the same year’s Anu and Mikko and Foxtail in the Armpit.

The whole film is tinged with tragedy, starting with its matter-of-fact incorporation of the recent (and as it would turn out, ongoing) war into the romantic subplot. Erkki (Onni Korhonen) has lost his arm in the conflict, and mistakenly believes that his betrothed Kirsi (Laila Rihte) will no longer love him. Ihantala, the Karelian village where much of the action takes place, would prove to be the site of the apocalyptic battle of Tali-Ihantala four years after this film was released. It, along with 10% of the rest of pre-war Finland was trimmed off by the Soviets, drastically altering the shape of the map that forms this film’s opening shot. Today, as part of the lost lands of Karelia, it is the Russian town of Petrovka. And this would prove to be Kaarlo Kartio’s last film, since he would die before completing his next. Confined to character roles since his star turn in Scapegoat (1935), the Lapatossu films were his last chance to shine as a leading man. At least in this one he got the girl, if only for about half a minute.

Jonathan Clements is the author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland.  He is watching all the Finnish films so you don’t have to.

Wounded in the Winter War, Karelian soldier Eino (Eino Kaipainen) is granted leave by his senior officer to visit his dying mother. He finds her in Antila, central Finland, just in time to bid a final farewell, but his late mother’s landlady Annikki (Ansa Ikonen) says he can stay if he works at the manor. Reluctant to rely on others’ charity, but fearing a lifetime of sofa-hopping and vagrancy, Eino takes her up on her offer, and starts renovating a nearby cottage.

He encounters his old war buddy, Janne (Vilho Auvinen), and they sing old songs from their lost homeland. Eino clashes with Annikki over her earnest offer of donating some old clothes to him, and eventually comes to realise that the various odd jobs he is performing are not intended to better the lives of the locals, but to prepare some of the manor land for a profitable sale.

Mika Waltari is back after his triumph with The February Manifesto (1939), and it never ceases to amaze just what a different a real writer can make. Oi, kallis Suomenmaa was based on his own article “Sotilan paluu” (The Return of the Soldier), published in the wartime bulletin Sotainvaliidi, a call for how things should be, “”a description of Finland in 1940, with its sorrows, struggles and hopes for the future.” Renamed to allude to the stirring Heikki Klemet anthem that plays over its ending credits, it is a fascinatingly modern treatment of the refugee condition, delving deep into the experience of being removed from one’s homeland and dumped in a faraway place, uprooted from all support. There is a certain irony, particularly in the English title for this film, Finland, Our Dear Native Land, since the Karelians are both natives and not-natives, “real” Finns who nevertheless hail from a place that has suddenly been turned into part of Russia. The fascinating story of how several hundred thousand Karelians were welcomed and somehow incorporated into free Finland in the 1940s is a story rarely told or referenced today, but Waltari’s script offers a form of up-close reportage of what it must have been like. Eino and his colleagues are variously welcomed, pitied, exploited and even pushed towards criminality by their experience, while the locals in their new home have to come to terms with the needs and wants of these very different people in their midst.

In a particularly moving scene, Eino and Janne run into the old kantele player Aku the Karelian (Toppo Elonperä), whose appearance will recall to any Finn watching the mythical poet of the Kalevala, Väinämöinen. But the bearded Aku is reduced to little more than a busker on the streets of Heinola, his hat on the ground conspicuously empty of any coins from the uncaring passers-by. He lurks in the rest of the film as a Gaimanesque phantom, an echo of ancient times somehow observing and participating in the modern world.

Ultimately, Eino’s hard work pays off, and he wins both his croft and the hand of fair Annikki, ending with the young lovers gazing down on the lakes and rolling fells of their beloved land. Director Wilho Ilmari ably steps up to the task, pausing the film wherever he can to point the camera literally and pointedly at the land of Finland itself.

There was a slew of films that touched on the Karelian refugees in the latter part of 1940, and Oi, kallis Suomenmaa was arguably the best when set against the likes of Anu and Mikko or Foxtail in the Armpit. Critics in the press were nowhere near as happy with it, decrying it for being too close to its material, too sentimental, and too naively patriotic. Leo Schulgin in the Helsingin Sanomat opined that it would take time and distance from the war to truly document events in dramatic form, but the story of the Karelian evacuees is one that remains scandalously undertold, even today. Writing for the Karjala newspaper in Lappeenranta, Erkki Paavolainen complained that its portrayal of Finland as a glorious pastoral paradise was one-sided, and rather avoided the burned-out homes and blackened forests of Karelia itself – a rather pointless criticism that seems to wish Waltari’s script had been about something else altogether. Notably, Waltari’s original script did begin with a montage of war-torn Karelia, but Ilmari cut it in pre-production. Only the unimpressable Paula Talaskivi in the Ilta Sanomat was actually impressed, praising the Suomen Filmiteollisuus studio for “tackling a delicate and demanding subject with excellent tact and consideration.” She also noted the strong use of Karelian music, an audio evocation of what the men have left behind, in its way just as expressive as Paavolainen’s wish-list for wreckage and ruins.

There are all sorts of lovely touches in this film, including Annikki’s fantastic expression at Eino’s mother’s graveside, as Eino puts his mother’s wedding ring on her finger, and she visibly struggles to contain her glee at what is supposed to be a sombre event. The camera pans across the other graves nearby, double-exposed on footage of marching soldiers, as if to say: this is why we fought.

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 the sleepy seaside town of Tukkilahti (Uusikaupunki here in exteriors), local banker Mauri (Eino Jurkka) is so busy that he has three back-to-back meetings in the evening, and no time to even stop to consider the marriage proposal from local law student Eino (Onni Korhonen) to his daughter Kyllikki (the vivacious Tuire Orri). That’s fine because neither me, nor you, nor cast, nor crew seem to care either, and the gormless young-lovers subplot is largely ignored in favour of a series of comedy capers.

Mauri and his friend Roger (Arvo Lehesmaa) are packed off to Helsinki on business, ostensibly so that local rivals can manufacture a means of ensuring their dismissal. In fact, they are intent on tracking down “Aunt Eulalia”, a wealthy widow whom they believe to be the custodian of a large inheritance for them. However, Eulalia (Birgit Kronström) turns out not to be the daffy old lady the men were expecting, but an attractive young woman who sings raunchy songs in nightclubs, and has already remarried a wealthy doctor, thereby confusing the legal standing of her late husband’s will.

A series of manufactured misunderstandings soon ensue, with Mauri’s trustworthiness called into question and the mistaken belief that someone has kidnapped someone’s cat, culminating in a hot-headed council meeting in which Tukkilahti shop stewards demand Mauri’s resignation, only for the overlooked Eino to deliver an impassioned speech in his defence.  Mauri realises that Eino is ideal son-in-law material (albeit rubbish at pretending to play the piano, I will observe), Eulalia reveals that she has ten thousand marks each set aside for Mauri and Roger, and Roger’s long-suffering wife Edla (director Eino Jurkka’s wife Emmi) comments that none of this would have happened in the first place if the men had just listened to their womenfolk – a sentence that functions as both a plot synopsis and a review.

The Finnish press was more forgiving, thrilling to the adaptation of the original 1929 play by Hjalmar Nortimo, and praising the Sampo-Filmi production team for integrating many of the songs from the original with a bunch of sea-shanties and variety pieces. Reading between the lines of the reviews in Helsingin Sanomat and Uusi Suomi, everybody loved the original play so much that a cinema version would have to be terrible indeed to get a bad notice – the sole complaints, that Aunt Eulalia wasn’t in it enough (this is true – the film is halfway done before they get to the Helsinki trip) and that the script flagged a bit in places, pointedly single out some of the only elements changed for the movie version. On the subject of which, Suomi-Filmi’s Ilmari Unho again penned this one under a pseudonym as he had done with Kalle Kollola, Cavalryman (1939), but rather gave the game away by writing on Suomi-Filmi headed paper. Don’t ever let that boy write a detective drama!

One also suspects that there was something about Nortimo’s original satire of small-town concerns that people who’d moved to the big cities could feel superior about, and ten years after the original play, that was almost everybody! Damning with faint praise, the student paper Ylioppilaslehti commented that “by the middle, you don’t want to leave.” By the middle, I was shouting at them to get on with it, but then again, when they do get to Helsinki we are treated to a bizarre Tarzan-and-Jane dance sequence, a teenage ballet recital and Eulalia’s singing, all as part of the “variety” sequence at her night-club.

Truth be told, at the time of the November 1940 premiere of this film, it had been a while that the Finnish cinema had seen such an obvious adaptation of a repertory-theatre farce for the screen (compare to All Kinds of Guests and For the Money), so perhaps there was a hope among critics that audiences were ready for it. Ironically, however takings were only mediocre in Helsinki, and slightly better than average in the provinces. As a result, despite such widespread praise, this second feature film from the Sampo-Filmi company was its last. Sampo-Filmi would make a handful of shorts over the next few years, but hereafter only shows up on databases as a distributor for foreign movies, in which capacity it continued to function into the 1960s.

Seen with 21st century hindsight, Aunt Eulalia is most memorable for the brief opening glimpses it offers of 1940s Uusikaupunki, majestic ships in the harbour, and unpaved streets still spattered with horse manure, wooden single-storey shops, with modest signs put up in the days before marketing.

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