Unexpected controversy arises after the Original Advertising Agency’s new underwear poster is a hit all over town, leading to claims that the pert model featured in it is actually Margit Helleheimo (Birgit Kronström), the daughter of a government minister facing a mid-term election. Hoping to weather the storm, agency head Bruno Blomster (Toppo Elonperä) arrives at Mr Helleheimo’s office to pitch his ideas for a new campaign to push government bonds. This only drags him into political skullduggery, as underling Hilpeläinen (Thure Bahne) schemes to bring down cabinet minister Helleheimo (Sven Relander) by any means necessary, including slut-shaming his daughter.

Summoned to account for his artwork, advertising executive Kalevi (Tauno Palo) lies to spare Margit’s reputation, and claims that he based his pictures on a dancer he met in Helsinki. The doubting minister demands that he present the real model within 48 hours.

Thrashing about in search of a suitable Finnish woman, Kalevi lurks at the theatre company of the impresario Oikero (Ossi Elstelä), where he is amazed to discover Manta Mutikainen (a.k.a. Baby Peggy), a dancer who is the spitting image of Margit, mainly because she is Margit, who has donned an unlikely disguise to audition for the role of her own double. After a series of quick-change farces that threaten to reveal her true identity, “Peggy” wins over the ministers and drags everybody into a sing-along, whereupon Minister Helleheimo awards the advertising contract, and all is well…

But no! Because Hilpeläinen arranges a dinner date with “Peggy” where he tries to enlist her help with bringing down the government. Later, Kalevi escorts her home and makes his feelings plain by snogging her face off and giving her a dog (not a euphemism). You would think that this might be a happy ending, but now Margit is incensed that Kalevi is is cheating on her with another woman, even though she is the other woman. Eventually, all such concerns are settled, and Kalevi and Margit seek her father’s blessing to get married. When Helleheimo seems about to refuse, Kalevi blackmails him, threatening to disclose his daughter’s modelling past after all unless he relents.

“All is fair in love,” says Margit. “You’re a lucky minister.” And the couple kiss as the thespians kick off in a song-and-dance celebration, presided over by Oikero, who is inexplicably dressed as Napoleon.

Turo Kartto’s script for Suomen Filmiteollisuus’ Onnellinen ministeri was lifted from the 1937 German musical Das Ministerium ist beleidigt, and had previously been performed onstage in Turku in 1938. Suomi-Filmi’s last movie of 1941 turned out to be a remarkably clockwork intersection of daffy plots, jettisoning all the songs from the stage version and replacing them with a bunch of new ones, including “Katupoikien laulu” (Song of the Street Boys), which has become a much-covered classic, albeit with the original reference to the streets of Soho [London] snipped out to make it sound more Finnish.

In fact, the film is crammed to bursting point with songs, starting off in the opening scene at the Original ad company, where the wartime starlets, the Harmony Sisters, cameo as singing telephonists, in a four-part harmony about how the boss can’t come to the phone right now. We’ve seen many musicals before over the last couple of years of this watchathon, but this one is the first to my mind that does anything more than ramming songs into the narrative. In The Lucky Cabinet Minister, dance and song are used to tell the story in all sorts of innovative and impressionistic ways – old news in the theatre, but rarely utilised in Finnish cinema until this point.

Take the opening number, “Mainostoimistolaulu” (Song of the Ad Agency). It doesn’t merely set up the bustle of the agency, but incorporates the arrival of Kalevi’s poster, and its distribution all around town. Proud of his company’s handiwork, Blomster walks briskly past admirers of the poster on the street, and buys a newspaper, and the camera focusses on his feet as he walks while reading, his jaunty pace coming to a shocked stop as he reads of the possible collapse of the government he hopes to take on as a client, flanked by a picture of the minister’s daughter in frilly knickers. Back at the office, the secretaries and their busboy (Lasse Pöysti, of The Suominen Family) are dancing around the poster in a Busby Berkley-esque group, alternately worshipping it and imitating it, as if to encapsulate the media fever around it… until the song is brought to a crashing stop by the arrival of Blomster.

Director Toivo Särkkä smartly leaves much of the singing in the hands of bona fide singers, as seen in a reprise in which Tauno Palo talks his way through his lyrics in a duet with Sirkka Sipilä and the Harmony Sisters. But that’s okay, because we know the Big Guns are waiting in the wings – Palo does eventually acquit himself in singing terms, but Birgit Konström, still coasting on her success after For the Money, has the dual singing and acting chops to carry the film all by herself. One expects that’s why she gets top billing, with a role that seems to have been written for a teenage ingenue, but which only the 36-year-old Konström could reasonably be expected to deliver.

We might detect some vestige of the original theatrical production in the way in which the actors are given times to rest. The Harmony Sisters fade from view after the first hour, to make way for Konström and the Swing Sisters, who obligingly perform a shuffle-dancing striptease while the lead sings “Katupoikien laulu”. Much of the film’s location shooting comprises entertaining but unnecessary sights of the billboard all over contemporary Helsinki, cheekily shoved into a number of iconic spots, including all around the central statue of the Forging of the Sampo.

You would think that several stage incarnations would let the plot and execution be nicely matured by the time it made it to the screen, but this appeared to set many critics against this 124-minute film. Paula Talaskivi, in the Ilta Sanomat, bragged that she’d seen it twice on stage, and was left bored by this cinema version. Toini Aaltonen in the Suomen Sosialidemokratti commented that the original’s Parisian setting had been excised for Helsinki for no good reason, a comment which seems to deliberately misunderstand how films work. Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti offered a far more incisive contextualisation of the film in terms of its era, noting that “idle celebrations and infidelities” seemed to be the touchstones of contemporary Finnish cinema, and that the film did itself no favours by relying so heavily on pratfalls and plot holes. “As such, the film is the lightest kind of entertainment, hardly even that, perhaps more correctly a waste of time from the viewer’s point of view.”

Posterity has been far kinder, with reviewers of the film’s later appearance on TV, untroubled be memories of the theatrical original, universally praising its vim and verve. I certainly found it much more enjoyable than I had been led to expect by the faint-hearted reviews of the 1940s, although in the woke 2020s, it is difficult not to take umbrage at the subtextual hand-wringing about a woman’s freedom to display her body. To be fair, the script depicts Margit as entirely uncaring about it, while the people of Helsinki, upon recognising her while out riding in public, literally break into applause. It is only the menfolk immediately around her who get in a tizz, before revealing how shallow their own perceptions are by failing to realise that Peggy and Margit are the same person. Meanwhile, there are some subtle suggestions of hypocrisy at work, particularly in a scene at her father’s home where Margit has a long conversation with a maid, in front of a massive rococo painting of a bunch of ladies with their baps out.

There is indeed, a certain class of Finnish women who all look the same, and it’s the thin, wriggly bright-eyed blondes usually favoured by foreign husbands (although not me). So much so, that at one Christmas party in 2003 for my beginner’s Finnish class when everybody brought along their Finnish wives, the pixie parade on display was so homogenous that I was genuinely worried someone might go home with the wrong Finn.

I asked our Finnish teacher if there was an equivalent language course where a majority of female students all had identical husbands.

“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Swedish.”

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 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.