August Fixes Everything (1942) | The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog
Despite never making it that far up the promotional ladder, August Kivipaasi (Aku Korhonen) has become a much-loved figure at Nikkari Bank, where he has been a cashier for 25 years. He offers sage advice to the janitor Nuutinen (Anton Soini), who wants to buy himself a cottage in the forest (the Finnish dream), and frets that young Anna (Toini Vartiainen), in demanding that her would-be fiancé Hannes (Hannes Häyränen) scrape up a suitable nest-egg before marriage, will doom him to never marrying at all. August still carries a torch for his colleague Maria (Siiri Angerkoski), but the pair of them never married because he could never quite pronounce that the time is right.
With the tin-eared lack of tact common to management, director Visapää (Thure Bahne) shows up at August’s quarter-century employee celebration to tell him that he and Maria have to be let go in order to clear space for his personal cronies as chief cashiers. As the staff protest, the bank’s chairman Baron von Bergenbohm (Jalmari Rinne), hems and haws, and suggests that a note of thanks for August’s long service should be entered into the general meeting’s minutes, as if that will solve everything.
When it comes to present the bank’s accounts, August refuses to hand them over, claiming that he has been industriously embezzling funds for the last 25 years, in lieu of the raise he was never granted. Accusing upper management of corruption and incompetence, he offers to hand the matter to the police, which will mean all the money is gone for good, or to give half of it back if the bank agrees to his demands.
Hannes and Anna need raises, so they can afford to get married. The bank will loan Nuutinen eight thousand marks so he can have his dream shed. Johanssen the family man (Eero Leväluona) is to get a raise as well, so his kids don’t starve. The bank acquiesces, and August reveals that he was lying about the embezzlement just to get some leverage. He makes a final demand: that Visapää shows up fifteen minutes early each day, instead of an hour late, and all is well.
Hannes and Anna can get married, but with their increased salaries, so can August and Maria, acquiring in the process a ready-mix family in the form of two Winter War orphans. As the cast gathers at Nuutinen’s cottage for a sing-song, Maria warns them not to wait as long as they did to start making a family. “Finland needs many, many children now,” comments Nuutinen, “Girls and boys. So go forth and multiply!”
This was a remake of the Swedish film Blyge Anton (1940), itself based on Alexander Faragó’s play Der Herr Schlögl. It’s not clear when Faragó’s play originally was performed, but by the time it was adapted for the Swedish screen in 1940, the screenwriters had wedged in a reference to a Swedish woman who had served in Finland’s Winter War. The Swedish original was screened in Finland in 1941 as The Poor Groom (Kehno sulhanen), but clearly struck enough of a chord with writer-director Toivo Särkkä for him to buy the rights to make his own adaptation.
Ironically, the Swedes in this version are the bad guys – there are pointedly Swedish names for many of the upper-class twits that August and his angry bankers are striking against. In some fashion, this may reflect Finland’s steady drift towards the left – it was only three years earlier, in Scorned (1939), that an alliance of self-made industrialists took on the corrupt saw-mill bosses. But here, our have-a-go hero is a man of little means, relying purely on his charisma and goodwill to outsmart the bosses – whereas Scorned was critical both of the Swedes and the Reds, August järjestää kaiken is a gentle parable of socialist bargaining.
The Finnish version piles on even more pointed references to the aftermath of the Winter War, and closes with a rendition of several verses of the song “Suomen kevät” (Finnish spring): “Finnish spring has finally arrived / the summer of our north.” However, it omits a controversial verse written in a time of German-inspired desire for lebensraum: “For a peaceful tomorrow / like our ancestors / for the creation of greater Finland / in the land of Kalevala.” For extra timeliness, there is even a moment of self-referential humour, when Anna suggests they could go to the cinema to see Marriage Inc. (1942) – a gag that backfires a little, as it ends up sounding like even the cast wish they were in a different film.
In spite of Aku Korhonen’s enduring status as a much-loved icon of Finnish cinema, the box office receipts for August Fixes Everything were disappointing, and the newspapers chose to make an example of it. The anonymous “O” in the Ilta Sanomat let it have it with both barrels, saying that it: “…very clearly reveals one of the worst stumbling blocks of Finnish film, its incurable dependence on theatre. In fact, is August anything but filmed theatre? That slow tempo of action, those long discussions, explications and moods, gestures and movements, the pathetic, theatrical tone of the dialogue – when will Finnish cinema really free itself from this burden? This critic is also bothered by the film’s constant melodrama, its weighty sentimentality, its heavy-handed didacticism. Undoubtedly, the latest [Suomi Filmiteollisuus] novelty is no achievement. It is a strange mixture of histrionics, farce and melodrama.”
And it’s true. So much of the action revolves around August at his little cashier’s desk, which both frames him and imprisons him. The cast and crew only get out of the bank setting with great difficulty, for a stroll in the park and the grand finale in the countryside. Otherwise, the movie struggles to hide the fact that this is a story that more or less takes place in a single room.
Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti was more forgiving, but also singled out the film’s origins as part of the problem. He wrote that he had never seen Faragó’s play (few people had, and looking at the Swedish sources, I suspect it may have been rushed into screen adaptation before it even made it to the stage), but that he assumed it to have been a farce. As far as Vesterdahl could tell, a light and witty confection had been ruined by attempts to shove in meaningful social commentary and unwelcome pathos. “[A] film that is half farce, half something else vague, somewhere between sentimentality and simpering banality, is a sad revelation. However, many similar films have dulled the taste of our film audience to such an extent that this film will probably sell out like a piece of counterfeit money.”
The regional press was more positive, although much of the commentary in papers like Vaasa and Uusi Aura feel to me like local hacks sitting on the fence because they were afraid they might have missed something. Kauppalehti hit the nail on the head, by describing a substandard script lifted out of the shallows by a reliable performer. “[Aku Korhonen] is undoubtedly our best film comedian, for whom the poverty of the script did not cause any difficulties. He brought his cashier to life down to the last lines and almost all the merits of the film must be attributed to him.”
With 21st-century eyes, this does look awfully like a comedy with the laughs taken out, although there is a touching finale as the main cast gather at Nuutinen’s cottage, for him to boast about his “very own potato barn” (at least, I think he said peruna talo) and for the camera to cut away to his hutch full of rabbits whenever he mentions the need to breed new Finns. Shot on a happy summer day in 1942, even as soldiers were fighting and dying in the Continuation War in Karelia, it represents a bright, and overly optimistic hope that by the time the film reached cinemas that September, the fighting would be over, and the Finns could return to their forest idyll.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so that you don’t have to.
