Toivo Mäkelä
The film follows a boy and the relationship between his birth mother and step mother. Based on the novels by Aapeli.
Pähkähullu Suomi (1967) (Crazy Finland) is a film that pushes every stereotype imaginable about Finland, and then some. Indeed, coming in the same year as Finland’s 50th anniversary, the film’s whole premise is about presenting Finland in hilarious fashion to foreigners and perhaps also making fun of some of the myths of Finnish culture for Finns themselves.
Nurse Sinikka (Pirkko Peltonen) wants to help a prisoner (Toivo Lehkonen) who crosses the border from the Soviet Union. She and her fiancé (Ville-Veikko Salminen) plan a flight via Finland with the help of her mother (Irma Seikkula). Ruth (Maija Karhi), the girlfriend of Sinikka's brother (Antti Litja), happens to witness the escape, which puts them all in danger.
A government official decides to steal a $25-million payroll and then fake his own death. However, in the process he is forced to kill an innocent bystander. He moves to a small rural village to start a new life with a new name and his new money, but finds that it's harder to escape his past than he thought it would be.
Finnish period comedy set to the times of WW I. Based on a play by Maria Jotuni.
The prequel, Komisario Palmun erehdys (1960), was a huge success, but its producer T.J. Särkkä forgot to reserve the filming rights of Mika Waltari's other Palmu-novel "Kuka murhasi rouva Skrofin". Mauno Mäkelä bought the rights and Kaasua, komisario Palmu (1961) was filmed under Fennada-Filmi.
Sten Lehtoja, a married, middle-aged businessman, picks up a young hitchhiker, Elsie, while driving to his summer home. Elsie spends the night and becomes his mistress. Later during the summer, Elsie also begins an affair with Reino, the teenage son of a local storekeeper. Sten offers to divorce his wife, and Elsie, attracted by the prospect of a secure social position, agrees to marry him when the divorce becomes final. One night when the couple are in bed, Reino climbs a ladder and attempts to force his way into their room; he falls and breaks his neck, and to avoid scandal Sten hides the body. But the strain of guilt ruins the romance, and Elsie contacts the police, who arrest her lover.
A closed room mystery begins when an infamous tycoon is found dead in his bath tub. The famous police lieutenant Palmu is summoned to investigate.
An uptight all-girl school teacher Leena Kataja stumbles upon a handsome artist Pertti Rinne who paints her face on a nude portrait, much to her chagrin. She is intent on keeping the painting out of circulation by stealing it from an art gallery, but the aftermath turns out to be more complex than she anticipated, leading Leena to become involved in various misunderstandings featuring a gang of criminals, inept cops and false murder charges among other things.
Aging professor of mathematics completes his life's work, a research project that has taken him decades, and climbs up from the boiler room (his study) and back to real life. He can hardly recognize his rebellious teenage kids and materialistic wife who hardly seem to notice his existence. The only person who is interested in the professor's work is Marja, his son's girlfriend and freshman at the university. An innocent infatuation flares up between the old man and the young girl, while the professor's family is only interested in the prize money awarded to the professor by an international jury for his academic achievements.
Grandmother Helena Junkkeri (Irma Seikkula) is working on a farm that her widowed son Arttu (Jussi Jurkka) is unable to take on. Taina Raitalo (Heidi Krohn), who arrives at the house as a childminder, makes the grieving man smile again, and Artu's little sister Päivi (Maija Karhi), in turn, delights the entire Junkkeri family with her achievements.
Like Rokava, the Ceylonese entry in the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, the title of the Finnish entry Eiokuu translates to Destiny. Directed by Matti Kassila, one of Finland's premiere filmmakers, Eiokuu was adapted from a novel by F. Sillipaa. Simply put, the story concerns the decline and fall of a once-proud family, thanks to the alcoholism of its paterfamilias. Toivo Makela delivers a powerfully effective performance as the inebriated protagonist, avoiding the usual "drunken" cliches. The overlong running time, coupled with the downbeat nature of the subject, limited the film's worldwide appeal.
Antti and Ville arrive in Stockholm to seek adventure, to entertain, to meet girls and to live in a new youth culture. However, when they get off the ship, they get into the wrong track and come across prostitution and drug crime.
A Bergmanesque triangle drama. After a weekend of dancing and camping on a recreation island near the city, a young factory worker decides to stay and cut work for a day. Walking around the now deserted island, he meets a beautiful woman camping alone and sunbathing in the nude on the beach. A hot romance flares up between the worker and the more upper-class married lady, lasting through the light-filled nights of the whole summer week until the woman's much older husband returns to the island the next weekend.
