Katariina (Helena Kara), “call me Kati”, is an orphan teenager sent away from Oulu to Helsinki to be raised by Mauri (Tauno Majuri) a friend of her late father’s, appointed as her guardian. I think you can probably imagine what’s going to happen, as do all of Mauri’s friends, who tut in disapproval when he announces that he’s going to get a barely-legal ward. The housekeeper Mrs Simola (Aino Lohikoski) does her best to put a brave face on the arrival of a vivacious young girl in the house of a confirmed bachelor.

Directed by Orvo Saarikivi for Suomi-Filmi, Poikamiesten holhokki was based on a novel, originally set in England, by one “Denys Aston”, which turned out to be a pen-name for the Finnish author Anni Inkeri Relander. In other words, the original was a comedy of manners that turned upon a very British set-up. Etiquette in Finland is a somewhat bipolar issue – much like Mauri and Kati, there is an unspoken stand-off between “Swedish” self-declared urban sophistication, and a homespun, folksy charm born of the Finnish countryside.

In the lead role, Helena Kara is a luminous presence a generation ahead of her time, whose mannerisms and carriage could easily mark out her out as a time traveller from the 1950s. She had, legendarily, been spotted by director Risto Orko when working as an usherette in a Turku cinema in 1937, and appears here, just a year later, with palpable star quality.

“Wotcher, Mauri!” says Kati, blundering into his all-boys salon and heartily shaking everybody’s hand. In a subtle audio touch, she speaks at all times at a volume a couple of notches above everybody else, even supporting characters to whom she is supposedly deferent. She puts her feet up on the furniture and invites Mauri’s doctor friend to have a look at her feet, eagerly accepting a cigarette from a cavalryman. Neither of them are getting what they bargained for, and it’s unclear on their first encounter who has the upper hand – is Kati a breath of fresh air, or a wayward wild-child in need of some discipline? One is reminded, immediately, of the strong woman of Juurakon Hulda, but the emphasis with Kati is more that she is a free spirit. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the first country in Europe to give women the right to vote, Kati is by no means the first female lead in Finnish cinema to represent everything that is modern and progressive.

She bounces on the bed, she sings in the shower… it’s hardly smoking crack on the stairs, is it? Mauri tuts and frets about her dangerous ways, but without any real understanding of why he is so morose and snappy, it is difficult to know if he wrestling with problems of his own or just a git. He stuffily suggests that she should take up embroidery or singing, and she giggles that girls her age are more into smoking fags and riding horses. Their encounters become increasingly wearing, as the script demands that Kati repeatedly behave like a pouty ingénue, and Mauri frowns at her like she’s just farted. One is tempted to suggest that Helena Kara’s naturalist verve becomes increasingly trammelled and hesitant the more she is pushed upon to actually act. Meanwhile, the film itself seems unsure how to fill its middle section, bogging down in a long soirée in which Kati (and the audience) must sit fidgeting through two musical numbers, and then packing her off on a bus to get a job in shoe shop, as if even the script writer has grown bored with the previous set-up.

The shoe shop is initially a fascinating glimpse of 1930s Finnish life, lined with anonymous boxes as if the notion of customer choice is still a distant dream. Visitors creep in and speak in hushed tones as if they are in the Church of Footwear.

“I would like some brown shoes,” intones the first customer, as if he is participating in some arcane ritual.

“What size are you?”

“Forty-four.”

Such inadvertent entertainments, however, soon turn just as dreary as Mauri’s distant lounge. Comedy is supposed to derive from the fact that five boxes are hard for a small woman to carry.

With only twenty minutes to go, the film reluctantly gets around to its central romance, with all the insouciance of a surly teen getting out of bed. Jaska (Ossi Elstelä) the chauffeur has bonded with Kati over horse-care, but has been forgotten for half the film. Kullervo Kalske, one of the most impossibly handsome men in Finland, fresh from charming the ladies in the same year’s For the Money, parachutes into the story to wow Kati’s fellow shop-girls as Baron Klaus von Bartel, a wealthy man of the world. He asks Mauri for Kati’s hand, and Mauri is suddenly reluctant to divest himself of the tearaway teen.

With all the enthusiasm of a man ticking the No Junk Mail box on an email subscription, Mauri suddenly confesses that Kati has brought magic into his life and he doesn’t want her to go. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, as someone once snarked.

Damning it with the faintest of praise in Aamulehti, journalist Orvo Kärkinen noted that it “met its most significant requirements.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland. He is watching every Finnish film ever made, so you don’t have to.

The title of this comedy from Suomi-Filmi is a pun – “For the Marks”, i.e. something along the lines of “One for the Money”, but also “For (Mr) Markka”, the stuffy old bachelor (Uuno Lakso) whose mansion is just about to be invaded by a cast of rude mechanicals. Released in October 1938, and clearly filmed at the height of the Finnish summer, it makes much of the sunshine and sporting opportunities of the Finnish riviera – the opening sequence bathes in the heady life of the Hanko peninsula, all beach balls, water slides, and games of leapfrog. In strangely timeless encounters that would not look out of place 80 years later, the menfolk conspire over how to chat up girls, not that the impossibly handsome Kullervo Kalske, last seen here in The Jaeger’s Bride (1938) needs to do anything more than snap his fingers. While there are several male leads, however, the film belongs almost entirely to the two ladies who variously pursue them or are pursued by them.

Gym teacher Ritva (Irma Seikkula) is looking for her sister Irmeli (Birgit Kronström) in Hanko, because she needs her for a fashion show… no, I don’t know why, either. But Ritva can’t find anywhere to stay, until she is offered a crash-space by Tilda (Aino Lohikoski), the maid at a rich man’s house. In an echo of the confusions of All Kinds of Guests (1936), she is ordered not to let anyone but the owner in, only to find the house besieged by a bunch of unexpected visitors, including the two lounge lizards that her sister Irmeli has met out on the town. If the plot device of random visitors descending on a house seems tired already, I would argue that it is emblematic of the limitations not of Finnish film, but of the Finnish theatre repertoire from which so many Finnish films then derived.

Although Markan Tähden was based on a play script, Hilja Valtonen’s Day of the Heiress (Päivä perijättärenä, 1932), it seems that the play version was never staged. Instead, it forms the latter acts of a movie that begins with vivacious outdoor location scenes, luxuriating in the opportunities presented for comedy business and Finns in swimsuits. It is, in fact, something of a let-down when the film grudgingly gets around to its actual story, tramping off to the real-world location of a Kulosaari mansion (supposedly just off the beach, but actually a hundred miles away in Helsinki, in what is now the embassy district), in order for a bunch of would-be couples to get bogged down in a series of misunderstandings, accidents with soda canisters, mistaken identities and pratfalls.

Comedy, such as it is, is expected to derive from wide-boys trying to scam a posh restaurant, and social climbers attempting to marry into money. Irmeli inveigles a stranger into pretending to be her Dad in order to throw off an unwelcome suitor, only to find that she has inadvertently charmed a man with loads of money. Seikkula, most memorable for her turn as the titular Juurakon Hulda (1937), wanders through each scene in a slight daze, as if the whole thing is beneath her, while Kronström, a multi-talented Swedish-Finn blessed with comic timing and musical skills, shines here in what would become the first of several flapper roles that would make her a wartime star. She certainly lights up every scene she’s in, and that’s before she sits down at the piano and starts belting out songs live.

The Finnish press criticised the film for some “somewhat unnecessary scenes”, although one wonders what that was supposed to mean. Frankly, the entire plot is unnecessary, and regardless of the critical reception at the time, the film’s value in 2020 comes from the wonderful glimpses it offers of Finland in the summer of 1938, before giving way to another dreary farce. As the two wayward sisters, Kronström and Seikkula are also hypnotically watchable when in individual scenes (including Seikkula in a bare-backed bubble-bath moment that was surely testing the bounds of 1930s respectability), but clunkily lacking in rapport when they are together. As the Finnish papers noted at the time, it created an odd situation whereby they were only believable as siblings went they weren’t in the same room.

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

Someone has been shot on the Jönsson farm, and the farmer’s wife Astrid (Kaisu Leppanen) sits in a court-room, watching the proceedings with hollow eyes. A police officer enters an old rifle and a hatchet as exhibits in what appears to be a murder case, and a series of participants are sworn in…

In flashback, Jonni (Eino Kaipainen) arrives at the Jönsson farm in search of work. He’s plainly desperate, as no sane person would want to spend more than ten minutes in the company of Astrid’s shouty, boozing husband Alfred (Kaarlo Angerkoski), a self-styled engineer who thinks that farm work is beneath him. Inevitably, Astrid seeks comfort in Jonni’s arms, and drama ensues.

Annoyed with some of the critical reaction he was getting for his urban tales and historical novels, the author Mika Waltari (see The Unruly Generation) decided to pull a fast one in 1937 by submitting this rural melodrama, Vieras mies tuli taloon, to a writing competition under a false name. His usual haters largely ignored it, although there were plenty of complaints about its moral turpitude, and a film version was swiftly rushed into production the following year, drawing both on the original and on Waltari’s sequel Jälkinäytös (Posthumous, 1938), a novella written in part to assuage critics who were annoyed at the unjust ending.

If it wasn’t shot on a staggered schedule on several occasions, then it makes masterful use of locations to imply that its outdoor scenes cover a farming year from the late days of winter to the collection of the harvest in the autumn. But the entire production seems to struggle with the degree of social realism it wants. Angerkoski is grimy and clammy-faced as befits his character, but Kaipainen and Leppanen both exhibit their usual movie-star good looks, all chiselled features (for him) and radiant skin (for her), which might be said to create a degree of audience sympathy — they look like a pair of romantic leads, so of course they are going to get off with one another.

Meanwhile, a palpable lack of incidental music in the early scenes plays up the loneliness and isolation of the remote farmhouse, only for the orchestra to suddenly strike up after twenty minutes, as if they were caught outside having a fag and are tardily grabbing their instruments. In what could have easily been a kitchen-sink playlet that never left the claustrophobic farmhouse, Waltari’s own adaptation of his stage script spends a conspicuous amount of time outside, chronicling the bright sun and rainy days of forest life. One scene brings a dose of unintentional humour, as the two would-be lovers try to have a romantic picnic in a birch grove, and Astrid visibly struggles to break a hard Finnish rye loaf in half. Her character yearns, constantly to make the best of the situations she finds herself in, pointedly noting when it is a nice day, bullishly insisting on a swim in a bracing lake, and sprucing up her horse with a sprig of flowers. But as the film progresses, these incidents take on an anxious tone, revealing that Astrid’s constant looks on the bright side of life are the symptoms of a woman at the end of her tether.

A stand-out character, largely through not standing out at all, is Aku Korhonen as Hermanni the forester, his usual loquacity dialled down to almost zero, and his features hidden so completely behind a bushy beard that I didn’t recognise him, even though he is a major presence in the whole film. In one, rare, comic scene, he slaps Angerkoski with a fish, so there’s that to look forward to.

Drinking and drunkenness is a recurring obsession in Finnish films of the period, in part because alcohol genuinely was a social problem, but also because of the fascination brought about by a more than a decade of Prohibition, which only ended in 1932, and hence remained a subject of interest years later, not only for authors but for the films that tag along behind their books like a delayed sonic boom. Whispered in the background as well is the matter of women’s rights, particularly after Jonni pulls a drunken Alfred away from an incident of attempted spousal rape.

Despite beginning after the events have happened, the film waits until the last ten minutes to reveal exactly what transpired — is it a double murder? Was it self-defence? Did anyone walk away to turn up as a last-minute witness for the defence…. or the prosecution? Of course they did!

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

New recruit Hemminki Aaltonen (Kaarlo Angerkoski) over-sleeps at reveille, he is late for drills, and he brings up the rear on speed-marches, complaining about his rheumatism. During training at a forest camp, he takes the delicate academic Lauri Auermaa (Leo Lähteenmäki) under his wing, inadvertently blundering into a burgeoning romance between the soft-spoken professor and the Captain’s daughter Elli (Ansa Ikonen).

Rykmentin Murhenkryyni (1938) began as a 1933 stage play by “Topias” (Toivo Kauppinen) but benefits greatly in cinema form from its real-world location work, affording valuable glimpses of the men and materiel of the Finnish army just before the outbreak of the Winter War. Most striking for me is the degree to which horses still form the engine of the army, with nary a tank or armoured car in sight. This is certainly a military tale as told by a generation that hasn’t seen any real conflict. The sergeant major who turfs the young recruits out of their bunks is ridiculously nice and soft-spoken, while the drill sergeant who berates Aaltonen for being late is a cartoonish caricature; this is more Stripes than Full Metal Jacket.

A cynic might suggest that this is all part of the plan in increasingly tense times, softening the image of military service until it looks less like a dangerous job, and more like a summer camp with some outdoor sports, a bit of marching and some hearty grub. These are not the men that, barely a year later, would be slitting the throats of Russians in their sleep, and dynamiting icy lakes to drown tank divisions. Instead they are friendly guardsmen standing behind rickety barriers and indulging in gentle banter with passing carters, while the daffy cadet Auermaa prances around the parade ground with a butterfly net, and asked if he can have a spin on a cavalry horse. With that in mind, remarkably little happens in the film, with the plot often playing second fiddle to prolonged scenes of marching, swimming, training and goofing off – not since Our Boys in the Air (1934) has the Suomen Filmiteollisuus company spent quite so much time poking around the everyday life of military personnel.

Despite being a comedy, this is the first time that Suomen Filmiteollisuus has had to face issues common to dramatic war films, too – once they’re in uniform, all the men look the bloody same. Unless some is shouting or malingering, it’s often difficult to work out which of the bumbling soldiers is which. Aku Korhonen, his head shaven like a billiard ball, is all but unrecognisable as Captain Routanen, and I wasted a whole minute trying to remember which soldier was the one in glasses in the mess hall, until I realised that it was Auermaa with his jacket off.

It takes twenty minutes before Ansa Ikonen suddenly appears as the love interest, trilling a jaunty song at the piano. Ikonen has been a regular feature in the last year or so of films from the company, but here seems ill at ease as the comedy ingénue, barking her lines at her fellow actors as if comedy is determined solely by volume, and seemingly blocking herself so that her face is perpetually ill-framed by the camera. She also wanders around in silly jodhpurs and a distractingly shiny satin blouse, but at least it’s obvious who she is! This, perhaps, is part of the plan, as half an hour later she dresses up as a captain herself, and manages to fool her suitor that she is a shouty male officer. Well, I did say that the uniforms made everyone look the same, and in Auermaa’s defence, without his spectacles on the, newly arrived “captain” is just a blur to him, and it is presumably not all that unusual in Finland for a deep-voiced woman in uniform to demand that snivelling underlings clean her jackboots.

Eventually, the comedy is shut down by the arrival of the Major-General (Jalmari Rinne), a dour and authoritative figure who cuts through the various knots into which the cast have got themselves, and gets to yell the big punchline: “What kind of garrison is this? The Captain is a girl and the sergeant-major is mad!” This presumably had a whole extra level of fun for Finnish audiences at the time, since actors Rinne and Ikonen were conducting a scandalously public affair. Barely a year later, Rinne would get a hasty divorce, and with presidential permission, eschew the usual legally-mandated delay to marry Ikonen before her pregnancy bump really began to show.

But I digress. It takes another twenty minutes of running around in the forest before Auermaa proposes to Elli. He is so shy that he only achieves this with Aaltonen standing behind him in the guise of a drill sergeant, commanding: “KISS NOW! KISS NOW! KISS NOW!” You might think Finland is still like this, to a certain extent, but I couldn’t possibly comment.

A final coda shows Aaltonen in happy domestic bliss with his own love interest, Mimmi (his real-life wife Siiri Angerkoski), heartily singing a military tune as he toils in the field, all malingering gone. The message is two-fold, that military life is good for you, and one day all this will be over – stirring stuff considering what was lurking just around the corner for Finland. The Winter War would break out thirteen months to the day after this film’s premiere.

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

In an unnamed coastal town, college lecturer Aare (Joel Rinne) is sweet on haberdashery assistant Emmi (Kaisu Leppänen), walking the street hand-in-hand, and taking bracing hikes in the woods. You might be forgiven for thinking that you had already walked in on a happy ending, but the townsfolk do not agree. Already in the opening scene, a passer-by scowls at the backs of the loving couple. Aare’s boss at the college hems and haws about “suitable companions”, and the women at a swish dinner party are aggressively flirtatious with a man who is supposedly spoken for, as if they regard him as their rightful property and his paramour as a risible diversion.

Aare has broken the rules, falling in love with a woman on the other side of the class divide, although as with the earlier The House at Roinila (1935), the nuances in behaviour and language are difficult for a foreigner to spot. Much of the storytelling is conveyed by the sets, contrasting the well-appointed society lounges of Aare’s circle with the grim, rooming-house clutter of the bedsit Emmi shares with her time-worn family, including brother Erkki (Eino Kaipianen).

The script for Syllisiäkö? is based on a 1933 play by Toivo Pekkanen, written and directed for the screen by former actor Jorma Nortimo, who makes a notable effort to push into the action, not only with the commonplace and distracting close-ups of his fellow Finnish directors, but with more intimate, over-the-shoulder angles, rather than a locked-off camera recording a play like so many Finnish films of the preceding decade. Although often defeated by the distractingly inexact jiggles of his focus-puller, Nortimo tries for literal kitchen-sink drama, contrasting Erkki scrubbing his face at a basin with Aare relaxing in an honest-to-goodness bath – more of a rarity in Finnish homes, which even today are more likely to use the same household space for a sauna.

The storyline’s 1933 origins are betrayed in part by some odd staging in a bar that suggests that Pekkanen’s original made more of flaunting the rules during Prohibition, although much of the scandal is diminished in a film version made six years after booze was legalised in Finland. In fact, since a fight at a drunken dance is what precipitates Aare’s fall from grace, we might argue that the entire drama somewhat misfires when restaged in an era when being drunk is no longer a crime. The preoccupations of the previous decade are also suggested when, 25 minutes into the film, Emmi suddenly starts singing to her mirror about her predicament, as if this were supposed to be a musical but someone had lost the memo until that moment. Kaarlo Kartio, as usual, criminally underused, turns up in a brief cameo as a shifty sailor selling stolen goods, another allusion that seems more suited to post-war 1920s austerity than the time in which the film is purportedly set.

“He’s a young man, and she’s a nice girl,” shrugs a gentleman at the ball-room, as if to ask if his dining companions if it’s really any of their business. In this case, it’s the womenfolk who tut and scowl about Emmi, although soon after, Emmi is harassed by men who presume she’s a part-time hooker. Putting a brave face on the trouble, she drags Aare away from the waltz to a working-class knees-up, only for the locals to similarly hiss behind their hands about her inappropriate choices.

The Culprits? is a departure from the Suomen Filmiteollisuus company’s contemporary run of a light-hearted comedies, pushing instead for an element of social realism and chin-stroking speculation. Its question mark is an integral part of the title and the poster design, challenging the audience to consider who is truly to blame for the drama that unfolds. Is it the snooty Finnish middle class, themselves unlikely to be more than a generation off the farms, or the sneering shop-girl frenemies who imply that Emmi has ideas above her station? Or is it the lovers themselves, pursuing a doomed romance despite “obvious” warning signs? Pekkanen’s original theatre script was called Siblings, suggesting a focus more on Emmi’s pugnacious brother Erkki (Eino Karpanen), whose confrontation with Aare at a dance makes it into the local newspaper, and takes the scandal public.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of noteworthy names among the faceless students in Aare’s class – a first appearance on camera for future film star Hannes Häyrinen, and a walk-on for Unto Kumpulainen, then a teenage camera assistant, but destined to become a cinematographer himself in years to come.

The Culprits? is a refreshing change from the norm in the chronology of Finnish cinema. Nortimo’s pursuit of realism is also a welcome innovation, not merely in his camerawork but in the presentation of a conflict that is relatively mundane and hence easy to identify with. That is, at least, until the final 20 minutes, when everybody starts to act as if another forgotten memo has been retrieved, telling them that everything is the end of the world, and nothing will ever be the same again, and the likelihood swiftly escalates that someone is going to get stabbed.

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

Admitting that their Helsinki apartment is in a terrible mess, three bachelors agree to hire some domestic help. Arvi the engineer (Joel Rinne) is struck dumb by the glamorous appearance of Helvi (Ansa Ikonen), the first girl to ring the doorbell, and agrees on the spot to whatever salary she demands. His flatmate Martti (Unto Salminen) is less easily impressed, turning away one flighty applicant before succumbing to the icy charms of the severe, English-competent Aili (Laila Rihte). Their journalist companion Salomon (Aku Korhonen) is counter-intuitively charmed by the bellowing, matronly Manta (Siiri Angerkoski), leading all three women to be hired as maids.

With a strong cast and a high concept that even the unfunny Agapetus would struggle to cock up, Oletko minä tullut haremiin? was based on his 1927 stage play, and had already been filmed once before by Suomi Filmi, in 1932, with Joel Rinne in the same role. I presume that since the 1932 version was directed by the late Erkki Karu, who would split from Suomi Filmi to found Suomen Filmiteollisuus in 1934, that the rights to this property rested with him, and not the company that he left behind. This remake initially received enthusiastic reviews in the Finnish press. Audiences, however, were less impressed, and its box office performance was low, quite possibly because the comedy relies not only on the usual cartoonish misunderstandings common to farce, but on sexist assumptions that belittle both men and women.

This is not even the first time that an Agapetus-derived script has tried to make comedy currency out of domestic service. The previous year’s The Assessor’s Woman Troubles had similarly tackled the dissonance between home and The Help, with many of the same cast. Comedy is supposed to derive from the utter inability of men to cope with household chores, and the fact that of the three maids, only Manta is the real deal – the others are a couple of rich girls slumming it for a laugh, hence Helvi’s inability to work out what the going rate is for a servant’s wages. Apart from a scene in which Manta mistakes Helvi for a fast lady who scandalously has her own key to the bachelors’ apartment, the film does not take a predictable route into workplace romance, since the girls already have suitors, and indeed, derive situational comedy from entertaining them in the freshly scrubbed apartment while the owners are out. The sauciest moment, at least from where I was sitting, was the sight of the girls leaving their shoes outside their doors, which in 1938 Helsinki seems to have carried the erotic charge of a belly-dance.

Before long, the hapless bachelors have been drafted in to help Helvi embark on a pointless deception aimed at her family, leading to the cringe-worthy moment when Salomon introduces himself to a scowling woman (Eine Laine) as Helvi’s father, only for her to archly introduce herself as Helvi’s mother. All’s well, inevitably, that ends well, with two of the bachelors getting brides, although one can hardly call it workplace harassment, since neither Helvi nor Aili appears to have actually done any work, instead leaving it all to the dour Manta.

Toivo Särkkä and Yrjö Norta return to an odd directorial affectation of some of their previous adaptations from the stage, cutting to shots in which actors directly address the camera, as if delivering the viewer literally into the middle of conversations that were previously only viewed from the other side of a proscenium arch in a theatre. There are some momentary glimpses of Helsinki life, but none of the extended location work that made the earlier Agapetus adaptation Scapegoat (1935) so alluring to the modern viewer.

At least the film is mercifully short, but at 58 minutes it barely qualifies as a feature, whereas the 1932 version ran for 93 minutes. The modern viewer is left wondering what cataclysm of budget, or censorship, or scheduling, caused it to be so drastically truncated, particularly when an overture and opening song delays the start of the film proper for two full minutes. Two minutes before the end, everything stops for a sing-song around the piano, followed by a prolonged musical coda over a blank screen, reducing the effective running time of this light-hearted farce to a mere 53 minutes. Possibly it was this that put 1938 audiences off, as it hardly constituted an “evening” at the cinema.

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

1916: and a battalion of German soldiers are off to fight on the Eastern Front. Wait. German? No, these are Finns, trained in Germany as elite “jaeger” fighters, although if the opening scenes are anything to go by, they certainly haven’t learned any manners. Somewhere in Latvia, the dancer Sabina (Tuulikki Paananen) is struggling to board the jaeger train. Her new-found guardian, the monocled Baron Lichtenstein (Erkki Uotila) gets into a fight with the young jaeger officer Martti (Kullervo Kalske), which leads to Martti being carted away to the brig.

In nearby Libau, Martti languishes in jail, singing interminably all the while and drawing a picture of Sabina on his cell wall. He has, inexplicably, fallen in love. Sabina, meanwhile, dances at the Golden Anchor restaurant, a rowdy ale house frequented by the jaegers, as well as Isak (Sasu Haapanen), a Suspicious Jew. The talk of the town is “Merovich”, a Russian super-spy who is ruining the Germans’ chances on the front. Except we have already seen the Baron passing a coded message to Isak at the train station – the Baron is Merovich, and we have to sit through a bunch of songs and half-hearted dance routines while waiting for the Finns to work this out. Martti is an odd protagonist in that he spends most of the film in prison, singing about a girl he has only just met.

Risto Orko’s Jääkärin morsian is a notorious film in Finnish cinema history. It lionises the German-trained jaeger battalion that was fated to swoop into Finland after the Russian revolution and play a vital part in the liberation of the country from the Communists. As a result, by 1948 it was regarded as dangerously anti-Soviet propaganda, and after protests from Moscow it was effectively banned for the next four decades. Yes, it was a problematic film because it was anti-Russian, and not because of the shameful portrayal of Jews as craven, hunched, swarthy traitors. Your mileage may vary.

Baron Lichtenstein is clearly marked as the master-spy Merovich from the opening scenes, turning the film into a waiting game as we twiddle our thumbs through all the pointless singing, as his local paramour Sonja (Ritva Aro) fumes that he has found a younger woman, and the merry Russian serving wenches flirt and banter with the raucous Finnish soldiers. Eventually, the Finns work out who has betrayed them, and there is a horseback chase, a bomb rigged to blow up a manor house, and a bunch of people shot off-screen. In the role of the fiery Sabina, Tuulikki Paananen gets to show off the skill that first brought her to the attention of directors from Suomi-Filmi, which was apparently her party-piece of dressing up as a Mexican bandit and dancing to a tune that only she could hear, while the soundtrack plays something entirely different.

The fascinating thing about this film is the Eastern European world it depicts, thrice-destroyed in the twentieth century by the First World War, the Second World War and then a generation under the Warsaw Pact. Prussia just isn’t a thing any more, but here we see its restaurants, manors, peoples and fashions. There are foreshadowings here of some alternate-universe Casablanca, perhaps titled “Everybody Comes to Sonja’s”, in which the German dastards are here switched into heroes, and songs are clumsily integrated into the narrative while a pretty girl wanders through the action in a sombrero.

Although her dance sequences are ruined by a poorly synched soundtrack, Tuulikki Paananen smoulders impressively as the innocent dancer Sabina. The child of a Finnish father and an American mother, Paananen was raised in the United States and would return there soon after the outbreak of the Winter War in 1939. Local rumour in Finland held that she has been arrested as a spy, but in fact she was trying to carve out a career in Hollywood. In the 1950s, she moved to Honolulu, where she ran a hula school. You really couldn’t make this up.

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