As we have seen in this book, Teuvo Tulio's reputation as a filmmaker declined steadily through his active career. While his critical status, starting with his early collaboration with Valentin Vaala, was never unequivocal, it can be generalised that until the mid-1940s he was regarded as a welcome innovator within Finnish cinema, a filmic-oriented alternative for the literary- and theatrically-minded majority of studio filmmakers. The sensationalism present in almost all of Tulio's works guaranteed that controversy and disputes often accompanied his premieres, often provoked by the director himself, but early on in his career, he usually managed to turn this to his advantage. From the late 1940s on, critics more and more often regarded Tulio's sensationalism as an objective in its own right, based on a repetitive repertoire of cheap thrills. However, after hitting a low point in the 1960s and 1970s, Tulio's critical reputation started gradually to rise again: his films achieved a kind of a cult status, as critics and enthusiasts raised after the studio era began to see them as intriguing anomalies from, rather than conventionally representative of, the period.

THREE FELLOW FILMMAKERS

In an interesting way, Tulio's critical reputation partly parallels and partly contrasts with that of two of his coeval filmmakers, Valentin Vaala and Nyrki Tapiovaara (Vaala was born in 1909, Tapiovaara in 1911 and Tulio in 1912). All three were, at least at some point in their careers, among the most respected filmmakers of the studio era, and all three now have an established position in Finnish film history. They are, for example, among the rather few filmmakers with a monograph devoted to their careers: a book on Tapiovaara by Sakari Toiviainen came out in 1986, a collection of essays on Tulio, edited by Toiviainen, in 2002, and a collection of essays on Vaala, edited by Kimmo Laine, Matti Lukkarila and Juha Seitajärvi, in 2004. However, the respective roads of these three filmmakers to the canon of Finnish cinema differ considerably. These differences shed light on the excessive idiosyncrasy of Tulio's style, as well as on the uneasy cultural position of melodrama as a genre.