Lentävä kalakukko

A train is travelling from Helsinki to Kuopio.In that train there are some escaping robbers.Esa Pakarinen plays The Conductor/Train detective Samuli Saastamoinen.The atmosphere is very jovial as the song says in Finnish.There's lots of singing and everything is good.Ville Salminen as the director and Reino Helismaa as the writer Lentävä kalakukko (1953) is a joyful Finish movie.Esa Pakarinen is there to make sure everybody's having a good time.Also his comic partner Masa Niemi is there playing a crook they call Läski-Leevi who has a twitching eye.Siiri Angerkoski plays a gypsy called Jenni and Armas Jokio is her man Aleksi.There are also Maj-Brit Heljo (Kaunis-Molly) and Pentti Irjala (Lumberjack).This movie works because of the fine characters it has.Lentävä kalakukko is good as a song and as a movie.

This movie was done after the second world war, when "light entertainment" was at the peak of its' popularity in Finland. The plot is very simple, with coffee smugglers (still rationed at the time) trying to make their escape with the product on a night train from Helsinki to Kuopio. A police officer assigned to counter smuggling on the rails is on their tail, and with a true motley crew of characters exchanging humorous dialogue and a song here and there hilarity is promised to ensue.

Well, the movie is really dated by now. The acting seems more suitable to a theatre stage than the big screen, the dialogue is simplistic as are the events of the plot. The songs are rather catchy, even with their outdated style, and even though aforementioned points may seem like complaints it's all well and good when taken into perspective. There is no biting more than can be chewed, and the promise of light entertainment is fulfilled.

The things I personally enjoyed the most were the abrupt musical numbers and at-the-time-humorous-but-nowadays-considered-racist stereotypes of minorities, but maybe not in the way the makers intended. All'n'all time well spent glimpsing into on- and off-screen world that is long gone.