The Day the Earth Froze (1959)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A joint Finnish-Soviet fantasy production aimed at a family audience, "The Sampo" is a very loose retelling of some of the tales in the Finnish national epic Kalevala. The film's focus falls on the fortunes of the hunter Lemminkäinen (Andris Oshin) and the blacksmith Ilmarinen (Ivan Voronov) as they battle the evil witch Louhi of the North Country (Pohjola). The trouble starts when Louhi (Anna Oroshko), greedy for personal wealth, decides she wants a sampo made. The only person in the world with the knowledge and skill to make a sampo, a magical object that can dispense endless riches, is Ilmarinen so Louhi contrives a scheme to force him to come to her. She kidnaps his beautiful young sister Annikki (Eve Kivi) and holds her prisoner; the news soon reaches Ilmarinen. Lemminkäinen has been wooing Annikki so he and Ilmarinen leave their community Kaleva and travel together to Pohjola to rescue Annikki. Louhi demands ransom in the form of the sampo and another arduous task from both men so they oblige and eventually Annikki is released to go back home with them.Sounds all very straightforward but some complications arise: Lemminkäinen decides Louhi can't be allowed to keep the sampo all to herself so he swims back to the witch's cave hideout while Ilmarinen and Annikki continue home. Lemminkäine 's rash actions endanger himself and his entire community in Kaleva as Louhi swears vengeance on him and tries to destroy his people by stealing the sun. Väinämöinen (Urho Somersalmi), portrayed as the community's leader, leads his people in a cooperative effort to fight Louhi and her army of sorcerers. Unfortunately for everyone, the sampo itself ends up destroyed, its parts scattered throughout the world, and Lemminkainen is only able to retrieve a small part for Kaleva."Sampo" is a series of little episodes in an overarching story about ambition and greed and the disasters they cause along with the value of cooperative effort in overcoming a great enemy. There is some redemption as well. At least the moral messages that appear compensate for the patchy good-versus-evil plot which doesn't do justice to the epic's complexity and dark characters. Some original Kalevala stories are worked into the movie but in a way that drains them of their power and prevents them from enriching the plot and its characters: to take one example, the subplot in which Lemminkäinen's mother (Ada Voitsik) rescues her son and brings him back to life is so whitewashed from its original that a lesson about effort and sacrifice is precluded and so the subplot becomes unnecessary. One story that unfortunately didn't find its way into the film is Louhi's all-out showdown with Väinämöinen, Lemminkäinen and Ilmarinen in the boat carrying the sampo; the script-writers substituted two weak episodes separating the fight and the sampo's destruction.The film's main asset is its special effects: they look cheap and some are cheesy but they're right for the job and aren't excessive for their scenes. (Now that would be cheesy!) Ilmarinen's separate creations of a horse and boat from fire and metal are suitably awe-inspiring and his sampo, a slightly hokey creation of coloured crystal, actually gains credibility as a wealth generator and then as a good luck charm once in pieces. Scenes in which Kaleva is cursed with everlasting blizzard and winter and in which some unfortunate people are covered over with snow are commendable. On the other hand some effects are quite comic and probably unnecessary: the twirling bear shot merely looks weird and creepy and the scenes with a talking birch tree are laughable.Speaking of trees, yours truly finds the main characters Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen as solid, expressive and unyielding as wood: they don't so much talk to each other and to others as declaim their sentences. Lemminkäinen dares just about anything and everything to knock him over – his face is frozen into expressions of resolution of varying degrees – and even death doesn't wipe that mask off his visage. Annikki is just a McGuffin figure to get Lemminkäinen and Ilmarinen up and running to Pohjola to meet the witch. The only worthy acting (maybe over-acting) comes from Oroshko who clearly relishes playing Louhi. Believe it or not, Oroshko is female in spite of her character's very mannish bearing and appearance, overgrown eyebrows. Some of Louhi's sorcerers offer performances to match Oroshko in overdone drama, especially when they think of the sampo and say in wonder: "…. sampo! …" and get that dazed faraway look in their eyes, but the camera doesn't pay much attention to these individuals.The film looks very beautiful and colourful in a way that might remind viewers of a certain age of Walt Disney nature documentaries of the 1950s – 60s; wherever the opportunity beckons, the camera lavishes its gaze on the silvery forests, the lakes and rivers, and general Finnish countryside scenery. The impression is of serenity and tranquillity in the dark and still birch trees. Opening scenes in the movie show rural people at work cutting down trees to clear the land for planting crops. Once the focus is on Lemminkainen and Ilmarinen journeying to Pohjala to save Annikki, the film pays no more attention to portraying rural Finnish life other than showing how men and women dress and how the interiors of their houses might appear. Unfortunately being a good-looking fantasy film isn't enough: a strong plot, lots of adventure, memorable characters tested and matured by adversity, and interactions with conflict – and the original Kalevala has plenty of these! – are just lacking here.

Warning! The original version of "Sampo" lasts over 90 minutes, and is a beautiful, atmospheric and awe-inspiring retelling of the Finnish legend of the Sampo, from their national epic, "The Kalevala". In many ways it was the great director Alexander Ptushko's most ambitious film: the idea of the Sampo itself goes far beyond the search for a mere object, touching on the mainsprings of desire and humanity's questing spirit (in much the same way as does the Holy Grail in Arthurian literature).Sadly, the American release as "The Day the Earth Froze" more or less destroyed the director's structure, his epic time scale, and the sense of mystery to the plot itself, sacrificing everything subtle in a brainless attempt to turn the film into helter-skelter action and swashbuckling excitement. Almost one third of the original film disappeared, and much of the rest was barbarically recut.The result is a travesty - please, if you watch and rightly condemn "The Day the Earth Froze", do not confuse this farago with the beautiful and profound original film which is (or was) "Sampo"!

Like most people, I only saw "Sampo"/"The Day The Earth Froze" as an episode on MST3K. Hopefully, though, that doesn't mean I am not qualified to comment on it, since I can distinguish the actual movie from the 'Bots good natured riffing on the subject. There are movies that MST3K covered because they were terrible, and there were movies that they covered because they were...odd and silly, at least to our sensibilities. "Sampo/TDTEF" falls into the latter school. My feeling is, that you have to make allowances for something like this. It's based on a fairy tale, for one thing, and not one by any Western story teller I knew, but some obscure Finnish guy. (Well, that at least guarantees that the story will be relatively fresh, as opposed to using the Grimms or Hans Christian Anderson.) It's obviously aimed at a juvenile audience, and the story is from the 'magical logic' school of plotting, where stuff happens just because it made some sort of deranged sense in the mind of a tot. You know, witch kidnaps the hero's love interest so she can get a "Sampo", but the hero steals the Sampo back, so the witch steals the SUN (she already has the North Wind in a baggie in her cave, so I guess this is on the same scale). So the village starts to freeze, and the villagers attack the witch by playing autoharps "en masse" and the music causes her to turn to stone and...you can't help but fell that this Finnish story teller had hit the schnapps and Aquavit vodka pretty hard before he sat down with pen and paper. And the dubbing is terrible; the heroes all talk in wooden monotones and the witch sounds like she suffers from throat nodule and hemorrhoids, and everything (including the music) is muffled and muddy. Some of this may have been due to a bad print. I am pretty sure that some whatever nice poetic conceits and allusions the screenwriters attempted were lost in the translation, because the dialog and speeches are mannered and clunky and dead in the water. The lines just lay there. This isn't helped by the fact that whoever these filmmakers were, they weren't very concerned about their story being accessible to non-Russo/Finnish audiences. On top of that, the "Earth" version seems to missing some footage cut from it - that makes the plot look even more disjointed than it is in the original. But still...there is some charm and quality here that speaks to the viewer's sympathy and attention if you can get past all the problems mentioned above. Someone took a lot of care and thought with the costumes, makeup and sets, and there are really nice shots and camera angles that please the eye in almost every scene. The 'special effects' are pretty laughable to our sensibilities, but they actually work in the context of the art direction. There's even a particularly memorable head shot of the "Immortal Blacksmith", glaring into the camera, framed from behind by a raging fire, which wouldn't be out of place in a much glossier, more expensive movie.I can't rate this particular cinematic experience above a "four", because the dubbing made my ears bleed. But I am sure that the original version was probably a great treat for its intended audience many years ago and a continent away.

Sampo......who can get that word out of their head??? It seems to be an infernal machine that makes gold, or salt, or flour, or something but whatever it does, everybody wants it and will go to any lengths to build one. This Scandanavian film has an unusual look to it but it appears that the print is faded, hence the washed out look. Or maybe it's because of all the snow and ice. But I must admit that I found it rather fascinating.The lead actors play it pretty much without emotion except for the witch who is a total pain in the butt. It took me a while to figure out if it was a man or a woman; regardless he/she was irritating. It moves along pretty slowly and there are times when it is difficult to figure out exactly what is going on.....that may be due to the terrible dubbing. I hate dubbing.....give me sub-titles anytime.The ending with the harps is insane. We should advise our military that harp music can be deadly and is a lot less messy than live ammunition. However, there is something rather endearing about this film that makes it worth watching. Of course, you need to see the MST3K version.... it is a lot more fun. Can you say Sampo?