Erkki Karu specialized in briskly paced farces and light melodramas that were so popular with Finnish audiences they were largely responsible for keeping Suomi-Filmi, Finland's first film company, solvent in the 1930s when foreign films dominated the theaters. Based on a bittersweet, farcical play about unrequited love by Finland's first modern novelist and playwright, Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872), The Village Shoemakers captures the defiant lack of self-pity that distinguished Kivi's literary style. Axel Slangus, later to play the old man in Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Spring, gives an unsentimental performance as a brawny bachelor whose bungled attempts at winning the girl of his dreams leave him to the solitude of a whiskey bottle. The life of Slangus's character resembles that of Kivi, who never married and who died at the age of 38 from drinking and despair.