Fashionista Liisa Pesonen (Helena Kara) crashes her bike in the street, a happenstance which causes passer-by Raimo Kaarna (Tauno Palo) to offer her a ticket to his concert. She loses her handbag and switches apartments after nuisance calls from an unknown man. At Raimo’s concert, she meets his artist friend Loviisa “Lullan” (Elsa Rantalainen), and the two girls become fast friends.

When Lullan is invited to the Kaarna family mansion to paint a portrait, she insists on bringing Liisa with her, leading to further flirtations with the absent-minded Raimo, and Raimo’s mistrustful mother (Helvi Kaario) to forbid him from getting too close. This, of course, is the only thing that inspires Raimo to look up from his musical scores and consider Liisa as a potential bride.

As if to prove her potential mother-in-law right, Liisa is the centre of an altercation at Mrs Kaarna’s birthday party, when she is accosted by a moustachioed man who has been stalking her around Helsinki. He is revealed as Bisse Holm (Thure Bahne), the “black sheep of the family”, who attempts to blackmail her into stealing 20,000 marks from the family. Raimo scares him off, but Liisa leaves in the night, proclaiming “The street’s where I came from and back there I’ll go.”

Bisse pursues her, but is happily hit by a car and killed, the third road accident in this road accident of a film, and Liisa faints in shock. At the hospital, an anxious Lullan renews her acquaintance with her suitor Dr Oksanen (Yrjö Tuominen), promising to give up her arty life and become a proper wife and mother. Sister Laurila (Aino Lohikoski), who is a nun but also somehow from the Salvation Army, explains that Liisa was a young girl on hard times, impregnated by a seducer, who suffocated her new-born illegitimate child by clutching it too hard to her bosom. Even though this is surely even more reason to banish her out of her sight, this story apparently moves Mrs Kaarna to sympathy, and she welcomes Liisa into the family!

It’s not merely that Puck feels like a pile-up of previous Finnish cinema hits (see, for example, The Mark of Sin, Safety Valve and Kara and Ilmari’s last work at their previous studio, Four Women, and that’s just in the year before); it’s that the crash is still ongoing as the film plays out, with easily enough plot to fuel several different movies. A simple romantic farce about missing theatre tickets and suitor misunderstandings is welded into a mystery about a Woman with a Past, while the synopsis above leaves out a bunch of side quests and mini-dramas that are not really pertinent to the plot. There’s a whole thing about a guy who is killed in a car accident, whose pregnant girlfriend Kirsti (Mirjami Kuosmanen) attempts to kill herself and has to be coaxed back to the world of the living by Liisa. The lovely Ester Toivanen, a favourite of this film blog, shows up in a minor role as Raimo’s sister, and there’s a pointless interlude in which the cast enact a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is the origin of Liisa’s nickname and the film’s title. One presumes it was all so complicated that the advertising department didn’t even bother to watch it, since the poster showed a naked woman in a forest, which has nothing to do with the content of the film.

Puck began life as a 1934 novel by Gunnar Widegren, translated from Swedish into Finnish as Prinsessa Pesonen in 1940, and hence presumably being a rare publication event in the midst of war. Writer-director Hannu Leminen’s film adaptation strips out almost every Swedish noun, moving the action from Stockholm to Helsinki and Fennicizing almost all the names, but presumably kept every moment and scene that was crammed into its 296 pages.

The critics of November 1942 damned it with faint praise. “The plot is certainly not tainted by novelty,” carped Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti, “but despite that, there is much in it that makes it a quality entertainment film.” Hufvudsbladet, Helsinki’s Swedish-language newspaper, thought that the whole thing was a breath of fresh air, although I can’t help but think that the critic, Hans Kutter, was putting a positive spin on its Swedish origins, and his assumption that if he didn’t like it, it must have been the sort of thing that appealed to the kidz. He was, however, quite merciless in his criticism of Elsa Rantalainen in the role of Lullan, who “…practically ruined the film with her shrill and tasteless performance.”

The anonymous critic for the Ilta Sanomat was much, much more exacting in his annoyance. “The film is not actually a ‘charming’ depiction of ‘old-fashioned love’,” he wrote, seemingly in answer to the marketing, or possibly even other critics. “It is an atmospheric relic from twenty years ago, an unintentional parody of everything that is artificial and offensive to modern taste, which in my opinion should already be confined to the archives of cinema. We are supposed to be amazed, yet again, by that old, tried-and-tested arsenal of clichéd elements of mundane Finnish cinema – tearful emotion, ridiculous outbursts of the tragicomic, over-acting, pathos that on this occasion would not even befit a weekly newspaper, a confusing backstory that defies even the most elementary psychological coherence, endless, empty chatter, and powerful ‘situational comedy’ sprinkled here and there – that’s the content of this film.”

As this film watchathon lurches on, there are signs of generational tension within the Finnish film business, particularly over issues of adapting novels and plays from decades earlier, and trying to cram them into the situations and morals of the 1940s. Widegren was born in 1886 – Puck feels like a baffled old man’s attempt to tell a story for the younger generation, occasionally forgetting what he is supposed to disapprove of, and often confused and uncomprehending of the degree to which times have changed.

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

Teenage firebrand Lotta Koskimaa (Liisa Tuomi) has had enough of Deputy Judge Arvo (Pentti Saares), and deserts him on the dancefloor at her school’s spring ball after he tries to get handsy. She tries to get the local pastor to dance, and the flustered man of God orders her from the school gym. She obeys but cheekily blows him a kiss on the way out.

Arvo slinks off for a second date with trainee dentist Raili Tervola (Lea Joutseno), who happens to have met Lotta’s brother Viljo (Tapio Nurkka) while waiting for him at the restaurant. Raili, too, hectors Arvo over his womanising and leaves him to it.

The Koskimaa family slink off to the countryside for a tense semi-holiday, with Lotta fuming about her school reprimand, and her father Einar (Paavo Jännes) discovering that her behaviour has put his own appointment, as a professor of dentistry, into doubt. Meanwhile, Einar and his wife are experiencing marital difficulties, and even as the love polygon of the younger cast members resolves into a standard Finnish happy ending, they face the prospect that the elder generation is about to split up, even as the eve of their twenty-fifth anniversary approaches.

Hopeakihlajaiset is based on a script by Klaus U. Suomela, which placed second in Suomi-Filmi’s notorious New Writers competition in 1940. As regular readers will know, the winner was The Dead Man Falls in Love (1942), described on this very blog as “ a garbage fire,” so how much worse was the runner-up? I note with interest that Finnish Wikipedia doesn’t even attempt a plot synopsis, possibly because the story is all over the place.

The production manager didn’t want to make it at all, and since the author had submitted it as a play rather than a screenplay, it had to be polished up by Martti Larni before it was even camera-ready. Suomela kited his competition win into a theatrical run for the play as well as a novelisation before the film even appeared – the film’s director Wilho Ilmari had also helmed the run at Helsinki’s National Theatre a year earlier, in which Aku Korhonen played Einar. For some reason, he did not come back for the screen adaptation.

Films of the era had to make a judgement call on whether to reference the war or not – would it be gauche not to mention it, or unwise to assume it would still be ongoing by the time production was complete? Like Ilmari’s previous August Fixes Everything (1942), The Silver Betrothal Anniversary simply pretends that the war isn’t happening at all, and so there are no references to rationing or the draft. Larni’s rewrite at least gets the cast out of the studio, for several location scenes, including Lea Joutseno bursting into song on a sailboat, wringing the most out of the scenery of the Finnish summer. The marine footage, in fact, is the thing that really marks this film out eighty years later, with fantastic shots of Sörnainen harbour and sailing sequences shot off Espoo’s Vapaaniemi. One of the production stills even features the film crew setting about their lunch by the sea, while a warship in fantastic dazzle camouflage lurks sinisterly offshore.

The critics, however, still found something to moan about. After only complaining a couple of weeks earlier that August Fixes Everything was too theatrical, Olavi Vesterdahl in Iltalehti complained that The Silver Betrothal Anniversary was too, well, filmy, citing numerous cut-up techniques and sudden cutaways as disruptions to the telling of what ought to have been a simple story. Meanwhile, Salama Simonen in Uusi Suomi said the exact opposite, that the film played way too much like a stage play that happened to be on camera. The film, certainly, is nothing to write home about, particularly considering the terrible sound quality of some of the school scenes, which were shot on location rather than on a set. But while the critics might have carped about the story, some of the framing of the shots still looks arty and compelling even today.

Screenwriter Martti Larni, previously seen here adapting Over the Border for Suomi-Filmi, is a fascinating figure in Finnish literary history. Although he adapted several screenplays during the 1940s, his real reputation was founded on his biting satires, not only of Finland, but of the United States of America, most notably in The Fourth Vertebrae, about a Finnish conman who finds a ready supply of victims in the Land of the Free. Unbeknownst to Larni, the book was extensively pirated in the Soviet Union, where the authorities were so enamoured by its take-downs that it was given away free at airports. After his brief wartime career in the movies, he would spend several years in the USA, where he eventually became the editor of a Finnish-language journal in Wisconsin, Työväen Osuustoimintalehti (the Worker’s Cooperative Magazine). He also wrote several books about the Finns of North America, including The Fire of Minnesota and A Camera Tour Among the Finns of America. Almost none of his work is available in English, although his books were translated into over 20 other languages.

Wilho Ilmari hoped to make another film, The Vanishing Border, but it was stuck in production hell after the military authorities refused to allow for the filming of scenes near the front line. He sloped off back to the theatre and would not direct another film until Love is Even Quicker Than Piiroinen’s Ram (1950).

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

On a visit to see her aunt on the Finnish side of the border, Eliisa Raaska (Irma Seikkula) falls for local boy Mikko Vanhala (the decidedly unboyish Joel Rinne). She would very much like to marry him, but her father (director Wilho Ilmari, sneaking into his own film) refuses to leave his home on the Soviet side, where he is clinging to the memory of his late Ingrian wife. Mikko is unaware that his mother (Emma Väänänen) has promised his hand in marriage to Helka (Senja Lehti), the daughter of the local landowner Meller (Eino Jurkka), in settlement of a debt. But Mikko has already crossed to the Soviet side to ask for Eliisa’s hand, and when she accepts, brings her to his Finnish home.

In Finland, Eliisa meets with a frosty reception, since her presence puts Mikko’s mother back into financial straits. She stomps off to her aunt’s house, while Mikko arranges a loan to pay off the debt. Her father, meanwhile, was lying when he said he would follow her to Finland. Instead, he sets fire to his house and shoots himself. Mikko finds a distraught Eliisa and persuades her to return to Finland with him before the border-crossing loophole is permanently shut down by Soviet soldiers. Their friend, the border guard Gregor (Santeri Karilo), helps them escape by shooting Ivan (Vilho Siivola), the dastardly Soviet officer who covets Eliisa for himself. As Eliisa and Mikko reach safety on the Finnish side, they hear another gunshot, as Gregor takes his own life.

Suomi-Filmi’s big release for autumn 1942 was a film that tapped right into the zeitgeist, an adaptation of Urho Karhumäki’s 1938 novel about life on the Karelian isthmus, where the locals have repeatedly found themselves branded Russian or Finnish, Finnish or Russian, depending on where politicians in distant capitals are drawing lines on a map. With a mordant, contemporary topic and a score by Uuno Klami, Over the Border was Finland’s entry in that year’s “Venice Film Olympics”, where it won a minor medal, which the press regarded as something of a consolation prize.

“Over the Border was a deep, vivid and psychologically believable portrayal of humanity,” said the film critic of Uusi Suomi. “There was a real sense of the border in the air.” Meanwhile, Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti thought it was a bit slow and lacking in action, but conceded that it did artfully demonstrate the way in which geopolitical concerns far above the heads of two people on either side of a humble barbed wire fence might suddenly render them unable to cross it – a matter of pregnant meaning to Finns in 1942, who were busily re-taking Karelia from the Russians who had stolen it, and would shortly have to hand it all back again. Deep down in Martti Larni’s script is a repeat of the idea that also surfaced in The Activists (1939), that people were people, and that there were surely good Russians like Gregor, too, although it was heavily implied that the bad ones like Ivan were hounding them to their deaths.

It was, perhaps, too tied to the zeitgeist. Delayed from its original release in April 1942, it enjoyed a brief moment in the sun and on theatre re-runs. When the Continuation War came to an end in 1944 and everybody started tiptoeing around the Russians like they were, well, a thin-skinned super-power with a penchant for false-flag attacks and land-grabs, it was very suddenly whipped out of cinemas, and was not seen again in Finland until the post-perestroika 1990s – compare to similar fates for The Activists and The Great Wrath (1939).

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

Despite never making it that far up the promotional ladder, August Kivipaasi (Aku Korhonen) has become a much-loved figure at Nikkari Bank, where he has been a cashier for 25 years. He offers sage advice to the janitor Nuutinen (Anton Soini), who wants to buy himself a cottage in the forest (the Finnish dream), and frets that young Anna (Toini Vartiainen), in demanding that her would-be fiancé Hannes (Hannes Häyränen) scrape up a suitable nest-egg before marriage, will doom him to never marrying at all. August still carries a torch for his colleague Maria (Siiri Angerkoski), but the pair of them never married because he could never quite pronounce that the time is right.

With the tin-eared lack of tact common to management, director Visapää (Thure Bahne) shows up at August’s quarter-century employee celebration to tell him that he and Maria have to be let go in order to clear space for his personal cronies as chief cashiers. As the staff protest, the bank’s chairman Baron von Bergenbohm (Jalmari Rinne), hems and haws, and suggests that a note of thanks for August’s long service should be entered into the general meeting’s minutes, as if that will solve everything.

When it comes to present the bank’s accounts, August refuses to hand them over, claiming that he has been industriously embezzling funds for the last 25 years, in lieu of the raise he was never granted. Accusing upper management of corruption and incompetence, he offers to hand the matter to the police, which will mean all the money is gone for good, or to give half of it back if the bank agrees to his demands.

Hannes and Anna need raises, so they can afford to get married. The bank will loan Nuutinen eight thousand marks so he can have his dream shed. Johanssen the family man (Eero Leväluona) is to get a raise as well, so his kids don’t starve. The bank acquiesces, and August reveals that he was lying about the embezzlement just to get some leverage. He makes a final demand: that Visapää shows up fifteen minutes early each day, instead of an hour late, and all is well.

Hannes and Anna can get married, but with their increased salaries, so can August and Maria, acquiring in the process a ready-mix family in the form of two Winter War orphans. As the cast gathers at Nuutinen’s cottage for a sing-song, Maria warns them not to wait as long as they did to start making a family. “Finland needs many, many children now,” comments Nuutinen, “Girls and boys. So go forth and multiply!”

This was a remake of the Swedish film Blyge Anton (1940), itself based on Alexander Faragó’s play Der Herr Schlögl. It’s not clear when Faragó’s play originally was performed, but by the time it was adapted for the Swedish screen in 1940, the screenwriters had wedged in a reference to a Swedish woman who had served in Finland’s Winter War. The Swedish original was screened in Finland in 1941 as The Poor Groom (Kehno sulhanen), but clearly struck enough of a chord with writer-director Toivo Särkkä for him to buy the rights to make his own adaptation.

Ironically, the Swedes in this version are the bad guys – there are pointedly Swedish names for many of the upper-class twits that August and his angry bankers are striking against. In some fashion, this may reflect Finland’s steady drift towards the left – it was only three years earlier, in Scorned (1939), that an alliance of self-made industrialists took on the corrupt saw-mill bosses. But here, our have-a-go hero is a man of little means, relying purely on his charisma and goodwill to outsmart the bosses – whereas Scorned was critical both of the Swedes and the Reds, August järjestää kaiken is a gentle parable of socialist bargaining.

The Finnish version piles on even more pointed references to the aftermath of the Winter War, and closes with a rendition of several verses of the song “Suomen kevät” (Finnish spring): “Finnish spring has finally arrived / the summer of our north.” However, it omits a controversial verse written in a time of German-inspired desire for lebensraum: “For a peaceful tomorrow / like our ancestors / for the creation of greater Finland / in the land of Kalevala.” For extra timeliness, there is even a moment of self-referential humour, when Anna suggests they could go to the cinema to see Marriage Inc. (1942) – a gag that backfires a little, as it ends up sounding like even the cast wish they were in a different film.

In spite of Aku Korhonen’s enduring status as a much-loved icon of Finnish cinema, the box office receipts for August Fixes Everything were disappointing, and the newspapers chose to make an example of it. The anonymous “O” in the Ilta Sanomat let it have it with both barrels, saying that it: “…very clearly reveals one of the worst stumbling blocks of Finnish film, its incurable dependence on theatre. In fact, is August anything but filmed theatre? That slow tempo of action, those long discussions, explications and moods, gestures and movements, the pathetic, theatrical tone of the dialogue – when will Finnish cinema really free itself from this burden? This critic is also bothered by the film’s constant melodrama, its weighty sentimentality, its heavy-handed didacticism. Undoubtedly, the latest [Suomi Filmiteollisuus] novelty is no achievement. It is a strange mixture of histrionics, farce and melodrama.”

And it’s true. So much of the action revolves around August at his little cashier’s desk, which both frames him and imprisons him. The cast and crew only get out of the bank setting with great difficulty, for a stroll in the park and the grand finale in the countryside. Otherwise, the movie struggles to hide the fact that this is a story that more or less takes place in a single room.

Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti was more forgiving, but also singled out the film’s origins as part of the problem. He wrote that he had never seen Faragó’s play (few people had, and looking at the Swedish sources, I suspect it may have been rushed into screen adaptation before it even made it to the stage), but that he assumed it to have been a farce. As far as Vesterdahl could tell, a light and witty confection had been ruined by attempts to shove in meaningful social commentary and unwelcome pathos. “[A] film that is half farce, half something else vague, somewhere between sentimentality and simpering banality, is a sad revelation. However, many similar films have dulled the taste of our film audience to such an extent that this film will probably sell out like a piece of counterfeit money.”

The regional press was more positive, although much of the commentary in papers like Vaasa and Uusi Aura feel to me like local hacks sitting on the fence because they were afraid they might have missed something. Kauppalehti hit the nail on the head, by describing a substandard script lifted out of the shallows by a reliable performer. “[Aku Korhonen] is undoubtedly our best film comedian, for whom the poverty of the script did not cause any difficulties. He brought his cashier to life down to the last lines and almost all the merits of the film must be attributed to him.”

With 21st-century eyes, this does look awfully like a comedy with the laughs taken out, although there is a touching finale as the main cast gather at Nuutinen’s cottage, for him to boast about his “very own potato barn” (at least, I think he said peruna talo) and for the camera to cut away to his hutch full of rabbits whenever he mentions the need to breed new Finns. Shot on a happy summer day in 1942, even as soldiers were fighting and dying in the Continuation War in Karelia, it represents a bright, and overly optimistic hope that by the time the film reached cinemas that September, the fighting would be over, and the Finns could return to their forest idyll.

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

It is Christmas 1984, and struggling single mother Niina (Oona Airola) accidentally smashes her new Christmas tree through the window of the local newspaper in Inari, Lapland. Pleading for mercy from the gruff editor Esko (Hannu-Pekka Björkman, unrecognisable beneath an extinction-level mullet wig), she tries to pay off her debt by working for free as a cub reporter. This harder than it sounds because much of Niina’s previously published work was poems about ponies in the school magazine, and Esko’s proudest scoop in the previous year was about a sock that someone lost through a hole in the ice in a fishing competition.

But try Niina does, in the midst of preparations for her sister’s entertainingly ghastly wedding, and an onslaught of guests at the remote Lapland hotel where her mother works. They are in town to investigate a mysterious “UFO” over the Christmas season, which foreign media is speculating was an off-course Russian missile.

Yes, it’s ridiculous. It’s also largely true, as this film from writer-director Miia Tervo draws its inspiration from the true story of the 1984 Lake Inari Incident. Like Atomic Blonde with shell-suits, it exults in the recreation of popular culture from 40 years ago, evoking far too many Finnish family photo albums for comfort – all dun-coloured Datsuns, transistor radios and grim buffets.

Niina’s dogged quest for the truth brings her into encounters with the military men at the hotel, including Kai (Pyry Kähkonen), the handsome, grieving pilot whose inability to see the intruder at high altitude might be one of the clues that it was a low-flying cruise missile. In a flurry of comic touches like something out of an Antti Tuomainen novel, the locals go crazy with Missile Trout (served with sparklers) and phallic Missile Doughnuts on sale. Esko would rather that Niina write about these delights, but she is determined to understand the geopolitical implications of a foreign city-busting weapon crashing near her sleepy hometown, and the implications if it happens to have scattered nuclear waste all over the landscape.

It’s here that the gentle humour of The Missile takes a turn for the dark, as Tommi Korpela growls at doubters that “nuclear power is perfectly safe” (eighteen months before Chernobyl), and the soundtrack ramps up with a bunch of melancholy disco floor fillers redolent of the era’s atomic paranoia.

As with Family Time, another recent Finnish film that Finnair has also seen fit to offer on its intercontinental flights this season, there is also a fine opportunity for learning some new Finnish terms and phrases, including “rubber arse cushion”. “Is the Russian arse so sweet that we have to lick it?” comments one old man, leaving Niina to haphazardly translate it for a baffled visiting Welshman.

Reviews in Finland were almost universally positive and glowing, apart from a lone dissenter, Jussi Virratvuori in the Karjalainen, who flayed it for “not knowing if it was comedy or tragedy.” But Tervo never promised us either – the film begins without credits or explanation, and if later events begin to hove close to the reason why Niina is a “single mother”, with the release from prison of her estranged husband, it’s not like it isn’t telegraphed in the opening scenes.

The presence of a few Estonian names among the cast and crew reveal this film’s origins as an elaborate Baltic Europudding of finances, deftly steered by its producers to land as a gentle evocation of life forty years ago, dripping like The Activists with pointed comments about the degree to which some things never change, with regard to certain neighbours across the border.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so that you don’t have to. The Missile is currently streaming on Netflix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Born in the early 1900s, Stiina (Irma Seikkula) is a foundling child, left on a doorstep in Helsinki’s Hermanni district, and taken in by Maria Berg (Anni Aitto). Maria is suffering from empty-nest syndrome after her grown-up son Martti (Tauno Majuri) has gone to sea. Stiina is christened at the same time as the neighbour’s son Vesa (Rauli Tuomi), and the two grow up more like siblings than strangers.

After her foster-mother dies, the adult Stiina is working at a grocery when Martti returns from sea. He is impressed with her sunny attitude and charitable acts, and recommends that she study home economics. At college, she shows sympathy and affection for an illegitimate child, remarking that she, too, bears the “Mark of Sin”, despite having no say in the matter herself.

Eventually, she discovers that the frail old lady Helviira (Henny Waljus) works as a backstreet abortionist, and is dying “haunted by the footsteps of all those I have killed.” Tragedy strikes when an abortion goes wrong and the patient, Stiina’s friend Martta (Heilka Helinä) died. The grieving pharmacist’s daughter, Kaarina (Emma Väänänen) reveals that Martta was her own illegitimate daughter, conceived with her fiancé Martti before he went to sea. Or at least, so she thinks. In fact, it is Stiina who was the infant handed to Helviira to dispose of, and Helviira who left the baby Stiina on Maria’s doorstep. Martti and Kaarina are reunited, and Stiina and Vesa are married, two whole families created out of chaos.

I can’t help but wonder if The Mark of Sin (Synnin puumerkki), like the same year’s Safety Valve, is another rumination on the generation that has grown up in Finland since women won the right to vote in 1907. Based on a 1928 novel of the same name by Laura Soinne, its narrative of illegitimacy and discrimination is intensely familiar from many a previous tale of foundlings and single mothers, but whereas such children were McGuffins and plot points in films like The Child is Mine (1940), here they are the protagonists and the agents of their own fate. Many of the tribulations that Stiina faces are rooted in the tensions of the gender divide – a pretty girl without financial security or an official guardian, she is regarded as an easy target by the menfolk of Finnish society. Some of them are genuinely predatory, others are simply unheeding of the pressures she is under simply by being born into her situation.

Writer-director Jorma Nortimo started out as an actor with the rival Suomen Filmiteollisuus studio, before moving into directing – The Mark of Sin was his first movie for Suomi-Filmi, and makes much of Hermanni, a one-time meat-packing district that has been the location of the city prison since 1888. Today, it is a warren of boxy apartment blocks, but Nortimo’s camera thrills in its clapper-board houses, allotments and laundry lines, back in the day when it was not-quite-town and not-quite-country, like so many of the characters that inhabit it.

The ease with which a novel can leap across the years is compromised on film, where one actor cannot play someone for their entire lifespan – although then again, they tried very hard with Ester Toivonen in Scorned (1939). Consequently, much of the establishing moments of the first 20 minutes are left in the hands of two child-actors, Suvi Soila (actually Suvi Orko, daughter of the producer Risto Orko),  and Orvo Kalevi, who appeared as Orvo Kontio in the same year’s Four Women.

It’s they who have to carry the narrative weight of Stiina being bullied as a child, and Vesa coming to her rescue; as well as the character-defining moment when Stiina tries to offer her button collection as payment for her foster-mother’s vital medicine, thereby winning the approval of the local pharmacist. But as critics were quick to point out, there are an awful lot of defining moments in this film. “There would be enough material for several different films,” observed Toini Aaltonen in the Suomen Sosialidemokraatti. “Towards the end, the viewer becomes so numb that they completely apathetically accept everything, no matter what happens. Nothing seems impossible anymore.”

Others were quick to point out that life in modern Finland was not quite so Dickensian for illegitimate children as the 1928 source material suggested, although I would counter that they might like to ask a few illegitimate children about that. I was present in the room on a fateful day in the 1990s when the father of my then-girlfriend realised that the man he had always thought of as his uncle had actually been his dad. It was a shocking revelation that stopped him in his tracks, as a whole bunch of familial slights and dramas, unspoken tensions and kindnesses suddenly made sense. It also opened a whole new can of worms, since the outed “uncle” had been a Catholic priest.

It all happened in mere seconds, before my very eyes, and it pole-axed him with a dramatic weight you only usually see in movies. It called into question his whole life, years of self-doubt, insecurities and gaslighting, as well as the often-odd behaviour of the people he now realised were his adoptive parents. All of this fell like an anvil on a man who had been born in the 1940s, a whole generation after Finnish critics were scoffing that the drama in The Mark of Sin was all outmoded and forgotten.

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

Grandma Ella (Leena Uotila) may be starting to lose her marbles, trilling with dead-eyed wonder at the height of the ceilings in the new Lahti Citymarket. Her daughter Susanna (Ria Kataja) wouldn’t know, because she “only shops for groceries in Sokos”, although what appears at first to be the airs and graces of a nouvelle riche turns out to be a matter of staff discount for a corporate minion. Each declaims random thoughts at the other as they muddle through the preparations for Christmas Eve, in Family Time (2023), a film that this chronological Finnish film blog will not get to in sequence for twenty years or more, but which your correspondent happened to stumble across on Finnair.

Grandpa Lasse (Tom Wentzel) heard a funny story at the fishing club. Daughter Susanna has got a promotion at the department store. Sister Helena (Elina Knihtilä) isn’t as impressed as Susanna thinks she should be. Helena’s son Simo (Sakari Topi) is just about to move out, considerably later than one might expect. Susanna’s kids just want a real Christmas where Grandpa doesn’t watch the telly with a beer in his hand. And Susanna’s husband Risto (Jarkko Pajunen) buries himself in tech support because at least that makes him useful. Literally nobody cares about what anyone else is doing, because nobody really wants to be there.

There is something of a shock for the Finnish film watcher who is hoisted suddenly out of this blog’s current location in the 1940s, to Tia Kouvo’s searing and empathetic study not so much of lost dreams, but of people who never got around to dreaming in the first place. Her modern-day Lahti is a soulless, joyless series of boxy supermarkets; her family gathering is a tense series of misunderstandings from a group of virtual strangers just waiting for it to end. This, then, is what is going to happen to the Family Suominen children when they grow up and have kids, and their kids have kids, and those kids don’t want to do anything but spin doughnuts in the Karkkianen car park.

Kouvo has an incisive eye for people who made a wrong turn so long ago that they can’t even remember which road they were on – a well-deserved win for her as both director and writer at this year’s Finnish academy awards, for this expansion of her 22-minute 2018 short. The film’s Finnish title, Mummola (“Grandma’s Place”) is supposed to invoke cosy winter reunions, but instead is revealed as a series of unwelcome culinary compromises, accompanied by a constant litany of people’s aches and pains. In English, it is called Family Time, alluding to an excruciating workplace workshop that Risto attends, in which he is exhorted to make the most of the eight hours a day that he isn’t sleeping or working. Risto does his best – he is the only person in the film seen reading a book – but even as he attempts to mansplain Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to his wife, she harrumphs that he has no interest in sex any more. Their subsequent confrontation in the garage, where the light sensor plunges everything into darkness unless someone is gesticulating wildly, is a study in pressure cooker drama and black humour.

Kouvo’s feature debut is a series of locked-off shots, the family often in shadow or off-screen, as a series of Pinteresque conflicts unfold. Nobody wants the awful Christmas dinner, Grandma has bought three packets of raisins “because they were cheap” but nobody got any walnuts. Grandpa isn’t just watching the rally in his pants (“NOBODY WANTS TO SEE YOUR BALLS!” shouts Grandma) but it’s a video of the rally, while his grand-daughter Hilla (Elli Pajanen) harangues him for not watching a Christmas movie at Christmas.

In one beautifully executed sequence, Risto and the kids tardily decorate the Christmas tree in silence while his off-screen wife and sister-in-law embark upon a nuclear argument about the difference between butter and margarine. Remarkably little happens in Family Time, but one is left with the impression that remarkably little has happened to these people for their whole lives. At least Hilla makes an attempt at being the voice of reason, gently chiding her grandfather for the amount of money she presumes he has thrown away on booze. These are quintessentially Finnish heroes, living embodiments of what Tolkien once called “sadly unsentimental lovers,” speaking wonderfully clear Finnish, for all you language students who want to be able to practice: “Grandpa shat on the carpet right in the middle of Hilla’s lovely song.”

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

Consul Ahrman (Paavo Jännes) and his son Timo (Tauno Majuri) believe that they are being followed by enemy agents. Timo is dispatched to Muursalo with a sealed envelope, and confesses to the family’s loyal military friend Rainer Sarmo (Joel Rinne) that he might need help in outrunning would-be saboteurs. Nor are the men paranoid – it turns out that their housemaid Leena (Rauha Rentola) is indeed working for foreign powers, as is revealed when Sarmo catches her doctoring the consul’s tea so she will have time to search his safe.

Sarmo apprehends Leena, only to be disturbed in turn by a masked agent (Hilkka Helinä), who helps her escape. Later on, Sarmo runs into Berita Lopez in a restaurant, falls in love with her, and also realises that she was the masked agent. Berita is the daughter of Luigi Lopez (Wilho Imari), once the richest man in Bueno Aires, ruined by the machinations of the enemy agent Thomas Gardner (Santeri Karilo), who is somehow also responsible for Timo’s fiancée breaking up with him.

Oh dear, what a mess, like trying to make sense of Casablanca through its reflection in a dented kettle. Believe it or not, this was the winning entry in a 1940 script competition hosted by Suomi-Filmi, netting a 50,000-mark prize for its author, the journalist Uuno Hirvonen, who would go on to pen two further adventures for Rainer Sarmo, a.k.a. Dettman, a.k.a. Deadman, in international espionage. The miracle, of course, with Casablanca, which was made a year after this, is that it, too, went into production as a forgettable retooling of the conventions of bedroom farce into espionage with papers and letters of transit and whatnot. It happened to work, in exactly the same way that this film… doesn’t.

The critics, however, loved it, like a breath of freshly noir air, a worthy successor to the earlier The Last Guest (1941). “”The suspenseful atmosphere is especially enhanced by the excellent cinematography,” enthused Toini Aaltonen in the Suomen Sosialidemikraatti. “The camera angles are varied, the lighting effects are inventive and generally the dark tone of the filming is so effective that you are startled when you come out and notice the bright daylight around you.” And, indeed, while the script might be an incomprehensible garbage fire, further compromised by the traditional coyness about revealing who the dastardly enemy power might be (Russia – it’s always Russia), the camerawork is superb. The stills from the film make it look far, far more exciting than it actually is. Hilkka Helina, in particular, is a smoldering onscreen presence, managing to make even an argument over coffee look like a battle to save the world.

Posterity has been less kind. When the film was released on television in 1989, Tapani Maskula in the Turun Sanomat let it have it with both barrels: “Watching the film today, one inevitably wonders about how bad the other stories submitted to the competition must have been when the one that won first prize doesn’t even make any sense.”

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