by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I decided to tap the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 archives for a suitable film for a low-energy night.
I dug out The Day the Earth Froze,
which I assumed (mostly on the similarity of its title to The Day the
Earth Stood Still) would be a bad
science-fiction movie. Instead it turned out to be a 1959 co-production of
Finland and the Soviet Union, directed by a Russian named Aleksandr Ptushko
(though that was not the way he
was credited on this print, whose logo proclaimed the U.S. distributor as
“American International Television”!) from a script by Viktor Vitkovich and
Grigori Yagdfeld with Väinö Kaukonen credited as “Finnish dialogue editor,”
based on the national epic of
Finland, the Kalevala. This
(badly) English-dubbed version featured a narrator, Marvin Miller, who in the
dull and slightly bored tone of the narrator in an audio-visual movie for high
schools explains that the film is based on the stories of Elias Lönnrot, who is
compared to the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen — and in the case of
the Grimms, certainly, the comparison is accurate: like the Grimms, Lönnrot
traveled throughout his country, partly for work (he was a doctor in his day
job) and partly because of his interest in folk tales and legends, which he got
people in villages throughout Finland to tell him and eventually wrote down in
two giant collections, the Old Kalevala (1835) and a later one simply called Kalevala (1849), which like the later editions of Walt
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
consisted of rewrites of the earlier material as well as new stories. Though
the Kalevala as it exists today
is a 19th century transcription rather than an authentically old
epic poem like the Iliad, Odyssey
and Nibelungenlied, it’s actually
based on ancient legends (unlike James MacPherson’s notorious 18th
century forgery Fingal, a
Scottish epic attributed to the poet Ossian, supposedly Fingal’s son, but
actually entirely MacPherson’s invention) and Lönnrot did attempt to write it
in the poetic style of the Finnish bards who originally created the material
and handed it down in an oral tradition, complete with heavy-duty alliteration
(also a feature of the Nibelungenlied and the libretti Wagner adapted from it for the Ring cycle) and regular meter, which 19th
century English translators largely followed and 20th century
English translators largely ignored. The Kalevala is a loosely connected series of interlocking plots,
and the movie’s opening narration gets so confusing that for a moment there I was
wondering when we were going to be tested on who was who and how they were
related, and how much that would count towards our final grade in the class.
But the major part of the film deals with the hero Lemminkäinen (Andris Oshin,
who was actually quite hot — he looked like a slightly stockier version of
Prince Valiant and even though the medieval costumes didn’t do much to reveal
it, a few shots showed off a quite impressive basket); his girlfriend, Annikki
(that’s not a particularly unusual name for a Finnish woman but the MST3K crew had a lot of fun with it, at one point cracking
“Annikki in the U.K.” as a reference to the Sex Pistols’ famous song); the evil
witch Louhi (Anna Orochko, whose costuming and makeup made her look like a
cross between the Wicked Witch of the West and Orson Welles as Macbeth — though
her gadget for flying is a cloak instead of a broomstick, the scenes with her
in the air seemed so much like the
ones in The Wizard of Oz I
half-expected her to leave behind a message in smoke reading, “Surrender
Annikki”); an old wise guy named Väinämöinen (in the entire Kalevala he’s actually the first human — the Finnish
equivalent of Epimetheus or Adam — but that’s not at all the case here),
another guy named Ilmarinen and various locations called Pohjola and Kalevala.
I recognized a lot of the proper names from the works of Jean Sibelius, by far
Finland’s most famous composer, who wrote a lot of music based on the Kalevala, including a five-movement symphony with choruses
and voices called Kullervo (which
was drawn from a part of the Kalevala not included in this film: it deals with the warrior Kullervo, whose
uncle murdered his father and the rest of his family but spared his mother and
sister; later Kullervo becomes a free-lance warrior, meets and falls in love
with a woman only to learn that she’s his sister, then fights a war against his
father’s kinsmen and annihilates them, and finally commits suicide out of
lingering shame over both incest and genocide — he’s sort of a combination of
Siegmund, Siegfried and Etli, a.k.a. Attila the Hun, who appears as a character
in a part of the Nibelungenlied
Wagner did not use) as well as a
four-movement suite (not designated as a symphony but effectively one) called The
Lemminkäinen Suite.
Alas, the people in
charge of this movie were far below Sibelius in talent — at least judging from
their work in this version of the film (when I looked it up on imdb.com the
review that came up was from someone pleading with people not to judge the
91-minute original release, Sampo,
on the basis of this severly cut and heavily re-edited piece of junk) — and The
Day the Earth Froze comes across as a
barely watchable piece of nonsense, appealing enough to look at (since it was a
Soviet co-production it was shot in “Sovcolor,” actually the old Agfacolor
process the Russians had looted from the Germans after World War II, and though
the print we were watching wasn’t of high quality it still had the delicate
pastel look that makes Agfacolor so appealing — a far cry from the shrieking,
overbright Pathécolor American International used for its own color
productions!) but making virtually no sense dramatically. The main dramatic
issue, to the extent there is one, concerns Lemminkäinen’s search for the
Sampo, some sort of magical whatsit, in the land of Pohjola (yet another
Sibelius work inspired by the Kalevala is called Pohjola’s Daughter, from which I had assumed that Pohjola was the name of a person instead
of a place); he gets it but then loses it on the way home (in the original
legend it falls into the sea and is unrecoverable), though in the movie he
manages to save a piece of it and it’s a sort of amorphous hunk of blue crystal
rock about the size of a dinner plate. Just what the Sampo is or why it’s so
important (or why its loss is such a tragedy) isn’t really explained in this
script, but its loss is significant enough that to avenge herself against
Lemminkäinen for first stealing and then losing it, the witch Louhi (ya
remember Louhi?) steals the sun
from the sky and hides it in a cave, thereby plunging the world into darkness
and cold (even colder than usual in Finland? Let’s face it, this is a country
that’s so far north on the globe they’re used to it being dark for months on end!) until
Lemminkäinen finally vanquishes her, restores the sun to its proper place in
the sky and the film ends.
Maybe it is unfair to judge this film on the basis of what we have — perhaps if we
got to saw a subtitled print of the 91-minute original cut this might actually
emerge as a good, or at least moderately entertaining, movie (and one would
think there are enough interesting stories in the Kalevala that more filmmakers than Aleksandr Ptushko would be
attracted to it as a source!) — but what we have is a nice-looking but
unwittingly silly film hampered not only by bad dubbing and a patronizing
narration but also a virtually nonexistent special-effects budget (though the
scene in which the sun’s rays penetrate out of the cave where Louhi hid the sun
and start making their way back to the sky where they belong is cool) and a
musical score by Igor Morozov (billed as “Otto Strode”!) which wouldn’t be that
good even if we didn’t have
Sibelius’ Kalevala-inspired works
to compare it to, and the MST3K
ridicule was especially nasty when they had the townspeople, in the scenes
where they’re singing Morozov’s musical drivel, chant, “Failure! A failure!”
regarding Lemminkäinen’s loss of the Sampo in tones that couldn’t help but
remind me of Sir Robin’s minstrels in Monty Python and the Holy
Grail.
