A Gothic romance directed by Valentin Vaala, based on a 1880 novella by Zachris Topelius.

Peter von Bagh’s essay on the film from Suomalaisen elokuvan kultainen kirja (“The Golden Book of Finnish Cinema”, 1992), with some additions:

Zachris Topelius’s romantic novelette from 1859 – practically a forerunner of the modern detective novel – was the source material for a costume drama produced by Suomi-Filmi for nearly four years in the exceptional conditions of Finland’s Continuation War (1941–44). There was a clear social call for this film, which [like Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis, released the same year] was set some hundred years in the past, in the 1840s. The story of an ancient family castle, its secrets and ghosts, fascinated the critics of the time as much as it did the public. “A romantic mist enshrouds the inhabitants of the noble castle and their guests – a charming, idyllic view of ages past, enhanced by the excellent set design by Roy and the splendid costumes typical for that time”, wrote one of them.

During his long career, Valentin Vaala made only a few historical films, but this film – just like the earlier Man from Sysmä (1938) – is a work that clearly bears his handprint. The star of the film is not History with a capital H, as in other similarly grandiose productions made by the same studio at that time, but rather small enchanting details that bring the past to the present: the sleigh ride of Kaarle Lithau (Rauli Tuomi) and Ringa Littow (Kaija Rahola), other rides through the night, the candelabras, history glowing romantically in candlelight. Rauli Tuomi was an actor whose brief and fervent career as a film star was launched by his portrayal in this movie of the mysterious architect Kaarle Lithau.

Vaala’s directorial touches are at their purest in the long sequences without much action, just shots of Lithau wandering around and searching for something. For whole minutes, all we have on the screen is the actor, the effects of light and sound, the ghostly presence of objects, and amidst all that also loneliness and the mystery of one’s own self: “In order to forget, a man needs to be either very happy or very unhappy – and I don’t know which one I am.”

One of the most important relationships in the movie is that between the two Littow sisters, of whom the older, Anna (Regina Linnanheimo), becomes more and more violent in her tendency to dominate her younger sister, Ringa, who in the end has to give up her love. As Lithau puts it, Ringa “loves her sister more than she does me”. The sisters’ relationship is characterized by many of the dominant themes of the war years – community, sacrifice, unselfishness – but it’s not without some erotic elements, too. Some of the shots, like a long tracking shot towards one of the beds of the mansion, have a subtle eroticism about them not far removed from such classics of the same time as The Cat People by Jacques Tourneur.

What other elements make The Green Chamber of Linnais a film of its time? (The film had its premiere on 4 February 1945, just five months after World War II ended for Finland.) One detail worth adding is the abundance of food and the joy of eating depicted in the film, a distant memory for most Finns, who were still dealing with the strict wartime ratios. And also the last line of the film, accompanied by a kiss: “The past is no longer, there is only a happy future.” A wish that would surely have struck a chord in the audiences of that time.

Linnaisten.vihrea.kamari.1945.WEB-DL.1080p.x264.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 38 min
Size: 	2.03 GiB
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Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1480x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	1.370
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 696 kb/s
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https://nitro.download/view/13E91D6864C2E9D/Linnaisten.vihrea.kamari.1945.WEB-DL.1080p.x264.mkv

Language(s):Finnish
Subtitles:English

The post Valentin Vaala – Linnaisten vihreä kamari AKA The Green Chamber of Linnais (1945) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Alexander Pushkin’s adaptation. The daughter of a lighthouse keeper runs away with a shipwrecked businessman to the city. But instead of her dreams, she finds herself selling herself in the streets, until a painter finds her as an ideal model for his next painting.

	
Rakkauden risti AKA The Cross of Love.1946.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC.x264-budumfilho.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 41 min
Size: 	4.04 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1480x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	1.370
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	5 442 kb/s
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Audio
#1:  	Finnish 2.0ch AAC LC @ 253 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/07174AFCB88628F/Rakkauden_risti_AKA_The_Cross_of_Love.1946.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC.x264-budumfilho.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/A5BE28EF79D2211/Rakkauden_risti_(The_Cross_of_Love)_(1946)_–_Teuvo_Tulio_track3_und.srt

Language(s):Finnish
Subtitles:English

The post Teuvo Tulio – Rakkauden risti AKA The Cross of Love (1946) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Teuvo Tulio’s remake of his 1946 film, Levoton veri AKA Restless Blood, possibly even wilder and more surrealistic than the original. Enjoy!

https://nitro.download/view/0A59E401939584C/Jealousy.mkv

Language(s):Finnish
Subtitles:English

The post Teuvo Tulio – Mustasukkaisuus AKA Jealousy (1953) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Pathological, triggered by the unbridled desire to take the story of jealousy towards the film noirs, the film shades of black crime, when Riitta decide to carve adulterous sister, imagining in their path. Again, Tulio used effectively ellipse: a meeting room floor of the Chamber of flashing clothes play almost frame by frame Riitta viettelysessiota own – except that it is now a narrow perspective to give a distorted picture of the situation. Similarly, recalling the horrors huteralla hanging: a child fell into the water past his own clumsiness, Riitta now use the tools to ensure that the structure to give up and his rival for its own sister ends up in the rapids.

Review:
Free-spirited Eeva (Linnanheimo, who also scripted) has been playing off against each other her two suitors, Judge Lauri Isokari (Majuri) and Kristian “Kris” (Ingvall), a doctor. In the end she chooses to marry Lauri, much to Kris’s chagrin—although he’s very civilized about it, remains a steadfast friend of both, etc. Over the years, however, Lauri starts to suspect that Eeva and Kris are more than friends—he even briefly worries that he might not be the father of his and Eeva’s son Kari (Petsola). After one blazing row, Eeva storms out to go to her mother’s, declaring she’ll return for Kari in the morning.

The next day Lauri—who’s on assignment as governor of the local prison—is told that a dangerous murderess has escaped from the train that was bringing her to the prison. Soon after, the murderess, Vera Puranen, is found—although amnesic from a head injury—and also the hideously mangled body of Eeva, run over by a train.

It’s soon made clear to us that, of course, it’s Vera who got run over and Eeva who’s the amnesiac, but no one in the movie realizes this and so Eeva is imprisoned in Vera’s place. Her habit of shrieking every time she sees the governor—whom she confusedly recognizes, but not as her husband—earns her a spell of hard labor in the peat bogs . . .

Meanwhile, Lauri, believing himself a widower, has become captivated by the artist Riitta (Karipää), and proposes to her: “What would you say if I asked you to move here and become a mother to two lonely men?” Kari likes her too, although he’s less happy about accepting her as a stepmother. But “Uncle” Kris talks him into the idea, and the new Isokari family settles down happily enough.

Riitta has been observing Prisoner 311 at her husband’s jail, and twists Lauri’s arm to let her paint the woman’s portrait. Prisoner 311 proves, predictably, to be Eeva/Vera. Brought to the Isokari home, she recognizes the lucky elephant that Kris once gave her, and then the family dog, who recognizes her right back, and Kari, who initially doesn’t. But then Kari puts two and two together, manages to engineer his mom’s escape from the prison (in a highly implausible plot, this is the most implausible bit of all), and installs her in the cellar of the family home. When Lauri finds her and discovers who she is, the stage is set for a hair-raising car chase, some miracle surgery by Doctor Kris, and some hamfisted attempts by the four adults to deal with an unusual domestic situation.

The movie sags awfully in the middle—especially when either Linnanheimo or director Tulio seems to have thought that the best way to convey Eeva’s amnesia was to show her not just overacting the bonkers bit but doing so v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y—and it’s also burdened with an oddly jaunty musical soundtrack: it’s hard for us to empathize fully with Eeva’s misery and degradation when the music sometimes directly offset against it seems to be inviting a pub singalong.

Despite these flaws, there’s much here of interest. I’ve seen the movie described as Hitchcockian, but for me it has far more of the feel of an Henri-Georges Clouzot outing. An example of a device that seems reminiscent of both directors comes when the amnesiac Eeva sees her son and then later her husband and can’t understand why their faces are familiar to her: to express this confusion and bewilderment, the camera offers us multiple images of those faces.

And there are some nice set pieces, too. One evening some while after Eeva’s supposed death, Lauri goes rowing on the lake opposite his house. A young woman swimming in the moonlit water grabs hold of a hawser trailing behind his dinghy and allows him to pull her along. As they exchange banter, they juggle the fancy that she’s a mermaid. So far as we viewers are concerned, the doubt remains as to whether the “mermaid” is really there or if she’s just a vision Lauri is having of Eeva—remembering a happier time, perhaps—or even if this is Eeva’s ghost. It’s only some while later, when Lauri, out hunting, finds Riitta sitting at a poolside having sprained her ankle, that it’s spelled out to us who the “mermaid” was.

Overall, then, this is a somewhat uneven piece—no masterpiece—but it’s certainly not a waste of a couple of hours. Tulio produced/directed other melodramas, and the extremely talented Linnanheimo starred in and wrote several of them. I’ll be keeping an eye out for others.

— John Grant (Noirish)

Extras included:

1. Introduction by film researcher Jaana Nikula

(in Finnish with English & Swedish subs)

2. Featurette – About Tulio



(in Finnish with English & Swedish subs)

http://nitroflare.com/view/F76E3D548EB5213/Rikollinen_nainen_%28A_Woman_of_Crime%29_%281952%29_–_Teuvo_Tulio.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/1A5B324056839E4/About_the_Movie.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/A5BCDD284D84F2F/About_Tulio.mkv

Language(s):Finnish
Subtitles:English, Finnish, Swedish (muxed)

The post Teuvo Tulio – Rikollinen nainen AKA A Woman of Crime [+Extras] (1952) first appeared on Cinema of the World.