Tulipunainen kyyhkynen

Matti Kassila is surely one of the most talented and versatile directors in the Finnish cinema. He was able to make films that are entertaining as well as films that have huge artistic quality and he was familiar with almost every genre, such as crime, comedy and drama. Tulipunainen kyyhkynen (The Scarlet Dove) is one of his great thrillers. It is based on his dream that he once saw when he was thinking about a idea of a new film. A middle-aged doctor finds out that his wife is having an affair with another man. He fallows his wife to the city and sees how she meets her lover and how they make love on an empty stadium. That's too unbearable for the doctor to watch and he starts to wander in the nocturnal city, but for some reason comes back to the stadium and finds his wife murdered. He calls the cops, but suddenly becomes the prime suspect himself.

Tulipunainen kyyhkynen is one of the few Finnish thriller that has perfectly captured all the essential film noir elements: big city by night (Helsinki), deceitful woman, crime of passion, detectives in their long overcoats, fatalism, existentialistic cinematography (black and white of course)...Tulipunainen kyyhkynen has certain impulses of Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (especially the plot), but also the Hitchcockian references are present in the film (a wrong man accused for the crime that he didn't commit). But the film avoids to be a straight plagiarized version of any of the great Hollywood film noir thrillers. It is too original to be anything like that.

Again Kassila has found the right actors for the right roles, Tauno Palo playing the middle-aged doctor in his last film appearance, Helen Elde playing a mysterious woman, Matti Oravisto playing the lover and Risto Mäkelä playing the sarcastic police lieutenant. And we cannot forget the great and clever script written by Juha Nevalainen, one of the best screenwriter of the old Finnish Cinema.