Now film is, and always has been a cottage industry to Finland. To achieve any form of success, there is a protocol; and that is to attract at least a half a million film-goers to the box-office - and mind you, the country's population clocks in at just 5.4 million.
During the Thirties and Forties, between fifteen and twenty-five features were done and dusted annually. Featherweight comedies, literary adaptations and rural romances were the call of the day. Risto Orko, who was lovingly referred to as 'the last Finnish film tycoon' and T.J. Sirkka were the leading personalities of this period.
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| Finest of Finland, Edvin Laine's The Unknown Soldier (1955) |
Orko's inherent gift for effervescent farce in the upper-class milieu was shown to good effect in 1934's Siltalan pehtoori which his rousing sense of melodrama was at its best in a flamboyant war film - set in 1916, with Finnish soldiers returning from Germany after fighting for the Kaiser - entitled Jaakarin morsian (The Infantryman's Bridge,1938. Sarkka's picaresque Kulkurin Valssi (The Vagabond's Waltz,1941) is one of the few Finnish films to have been seen by more than one million spectators in its native land.
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| Nyrki Tapiovaara (1911-1940) |
Nyrki Tapiovaara, who was killed at the age of 28 behind Russian lines just before the end of the Winter War, has acquired a posthumous reputation on the strength of merely five features. Varastettu Kuolema (Stolen Death,1938) being the most intriguing of the set, takes course in the gray, dubious years at the start of the last century when 'activists' were engaged in an underground campaign to foil the expansionist designs of Tsarist Russia.
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| Erik Blomberg gets back to nature with the evocative Valkoinen puera (1952) |
War has frequently been the inspiration for imposing films from Finland. And none would be more so the case than 1955's The Unknown Soldier. A celebrated film directed by Edvin Laine based on the famous novel by Vaino Linna, it starred one of the country's more famous faces, Kosti Klemela and captured the peculiar blend of joviality and bitterness that characterizes the Finnish people's disposition towards the Russians and the wars of attrition that have engaged both nations.
During the Fifties, other names came forward for consideration in the history of Finnish film: Erik Blomberg, for his searing and optically exhilarating saga Valkoinen peura (The White Reindeer,1952); Matti Kassila for Sinnen vikko (Scarlet Week,1954) which described, is an idiom very similar to that of Ingmar Bergman, a clandestine affair between a young drifter and a married woman during the summer holidays. Kassila received highest of accolades for Elokuu (The Harvest Month,1956) a bold statement regarding the ravages of alcoholism in a rural environment. The film was based on a novel written by Frans Eemil Sillanpaa; a Nobel laureate who stands as one of Finland's greatest writers to date.