It is the summer of 1941. An eastern-Finnish machine gun company receives an order to turn in their surplus equipment. The company is transferred to the front lines. The next morning the soldiers wake to the sound of guns – the war has begun.

A wide-eyed doll salesman is mistaken for a bomb-wielding anarchist by the oppressive forces of the totalitarian state.

An architect, who has recently married a new, younger wife, tries to re-connect with his ex-wife, who is being courted by another man.

Kaarina, an orphan girl raised by Taneli, the innkeeper, notices that her friendship with her childhood friend Antti is turning into romance. Henrik, the patron, also has his eye on Kaarina.

After her mother's death, Irja, an evacuee girl, finds herself in a poor financial situation. Working as a housekeeper for her former teacher on a starvation wage, her situation improves when she is hired as a janitor at a secondary school. Despite the opposition of Principal Kuusi, she decides to take the matriculation examination and, in order to improve her writing skills, responds to a correspondence advertisement placed by the mysterious Master Ahtojää.

Set in early 16th century Finland, a knight Olavi Gideoninpoika meets Mirjam Raakelintytär and falls in love. Mirjami hides in a monastery disguised as a choir boy, but is revealed by a monk Rasmus, who also desires her, and is put on trial.

Ilona, an orphan from the cruel Paksula family, ends up in Helsinki at a children's home for immigrants and from there becomes a foster daughter in the Orpana family, where she begins to sort out the relationship between her war-disabled stepbrother Pentti and his girlfriend Irene.

Justiina Puupää drives her husband Pekka and his friend Pätkä to look for work. The two decide to make money the easy way and try to have an accident after first getting accident insurance. After trying their luck, they hurt their heads and in the hospital, the comrades see each other's more outrageous antics.

Juha lives together with younger woman Marja. Juha loves her, but Marja seems to belong to somewhere else. Things get complicated when casanova Shemeikka arrives from strange lands and takes Marja away with him.

Arrested for a murder he didn't commit, American adventurer Bart Lanigan is about to be deported from Finland on a freighter. In the Helsinki harbor, he himself becomes a target for a hit man but manages to escape back to land. Lanigan contacts Arvo Mäki, a womanizing local con man recommended to him as a man he could trust. Lanigan is in Finland to catch an American millionaire businessman, Leonard Weston alias Lawrence Walker, who has fled the USA with the company's monies and begun investing them in Finland. Looking for the mysterious L.W. character while trying to get rid of various hit men, Lanigan and Mäki travel around picturesque southern Finland, joined by a pretty night club singer Marja Salo who won't leave Lanigan alone and insists on marrying him.