Finnish movies: My List

Two guys working at a gas station invest their modest lottery prize in a scheme to increase their wealth by marrying some real money. Posing as Texas oil millionaires with Finnish descent, they manage to convince many young ladies and their wealthy parents, but also get to taste their own medicine when it turns out they may not be the only impostors around.

A government official decides to steal a $25-million markka payroll (=$78,000 USD) 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.

Inspector Palmu investigates the death of an old astronomer, whose body is found on Helsinki's Observatory Hill, but the investigation is complicated by the media's spreading of false information concerning the case.

A young colleague of a successful architect tries to find a reason for the architect's unexpected suicide.

A group of mischievous Finnish boys experience the ups and downs of life during World War 2.

After spending an enjoyable summer with a guy in the archipelago, a girl comes to Helsinki and goes through a meandering search trying to find him again.

The thriller Vaarallista vapautta (Dangerous Freedom) (1962), is based on Tuuli Reijonen's novel. Nurse Sinikka (Pirkko Peltonen) wants to help a prisoner (Toivo Lehkonen) who defected across the border from the Soviet Union. She and her fiance (Ville-Veikko Salminen) plan an escape trip for him from Finland with the help of her mother (Irma Seikkula). Sinika's brother's (Antti Litja) girlfriend Ruth (Maija Karhi) happens to witness the escape, which puts her accomplices in danger.

Klaus Grahn is a young law student in his early twenties. He has a loyal and nice blonde girlfriend Anita, but is drawn towards a new love interest, the dark haired and more exciting Eija. Frustrated by his small earnings writing bits and pieces for a newspaper he gets the idea for a perfect crime. He forges a check and cashes it in a bank, but the money runs out and now the police are after him. Desperate he boards a train to Tampere and robs a taxi there and shoots the driver with his sawn-off rifle. Getting back to Helsinki he succeeds in avoiding the police who have come to meet him at the train station. He contacts both his girlfriends, who still do not know of the killing. Anita tries to talk some sense to him but fails. Eija tries to comfort him with he loving feelings. After drinking in a bar, Klaus runs amok through the city. He thinks he has been turned in to the police by the girls. He confronts them for the last time - with the gun in his hands.

Lieutenant Takala joins a group of war veterans who gather in a restaurant to reminisce their unit's operations on the Finnish-Soviet front. A flashback takes us back to summer 1944 where the unit, led by Takala, performs dangerous guerrilla operations behind enemy lines. A subplot alleges sexual liaisons between soldiers and female volunteers, which caused controversy when the film and the novel it's based on were released in the early 1960s.

Two bored teenagers from the country side move to Helsinki and end up in the claws of a tough street gang.

A family man who wants to remain childless is accidentally left with the baby of a hitchhiker he met on the way home from work.

Summer 1941, soon after the Finnish Winter War. Wist and Anttala are young war veterans whose homes ended up on the wrong side of the new border after the Soviet Union claimed ownership of the Finnish Karelia as a result of the war. The men decide to reclaim a chest full of silver that was hidden under Wist's home before the family was evacuated to Finland. Together with Paukku, a third young man with less experience in risky situations, they cross the border at nighttime and start their dangerous expedition through Soviet terrain.

A summer romance remembered.

A journalist is reporting on prostitutes active in the harbor area. He falls in love with the beautiful and different Vuokko.

A kind-hearted chancellor dreams of love with a beauty he meets at dinner.

Baron Wilhelm von Tandem, CEO of the Tandem Corporation, gets mixed up with a spitting image of himself, an innocent country boy Kalle. Both characters conveniently amnesiac, they start living each other's lives and dating each other's girlfriends, succeeding in their new roles better than in their original ones. Level-headed Kalle soon spots the bad guys who are after the Baron's money, and the Baron brings innovative ideas to the countryside.

Arrested for a murder he didn't commit, American adventurer Bart Lanigan is about to be deported from Finland on a freighter. In the Helsinki harbor, he himself becomes a target for a hit man but manages to escape back to land. Lanigan contacts Arvo Mäki, a womanizing local con man recommended to him as a man he could trust. Lanigan is in Finland to catch an American millionaire businessman, Leonard Weston alias Lawrence Walker, who has fled the USA with the company's monies and begun investing them in Finland. Looking for the mysterious L.W. character while trying to get rid of various hit men, Lanigan and Mäki travel around picturesque southern Finland, joined by a pretty night club singer Marja Salo who won't leave Lanigan alone and insists on marrying him.

Young, broke acting students look for work and love in sixties Paris.

A disillusioned visual artist and student girl find magnetic attraction for one night. She temporarily quenches his burn of alcohol and hunger for love, while he makes her forget her fatal illness.

A Finnish UN soldier falls in love with a beautiful Greek girl in Cyprus. Their love is mutual but cultural differences and misunderstandings complicate a romance that stretches across the language wall.

From the 1960s, social issues became central to the young Finnish novelists and poets. Hannu Salama went through a famous trial for blasphemy for his novel Juhannustanssit (Juhannus Dances, 1964).