User Reviews

Spede Pasanen plays Baron Wilhelm von Tandem and he's also Kalle, a man who lives much simpler life in a countryside.In some point Kalle becomes the Baron and the Baron becomes Kalle.That causes many problems for both of them.Risto Jarva, Jaakko Pakkasvirta and Spede Pasanen directed X-Paroni in 1964 and it was Spede's first movie.Before this he was only in small roles and of course he wrote himself a double role for his first movie.He does a great job as both of the characters.In this movie he does what he did in all of his movies;he steals the show.This great late movie maker was an excellent comic.And of course there's also Simo Salminen, the man who was Spede's partner in many movies for so many years.Tapio Rautavaara and Anneli Sauli make visits in this comedy classic.All the actors do a great job.For the youngsters today this movie may be too slow which is a shame.Kids today should watch these old movies and not only those fast paced action movies.There are many great moments in X-Paroni even though it fails in the end a little.Spede did make some better movies later but still it's a good comedy and I recommend it for everybody who likes old Finnish comedies and Spede's movies.

This surely is a classic you must see if you like (or dislike) Spede's production. The plot is tolerable and, more importantly, clearly existent. The actors perform decently, even though it really is a one man show as we see Spede (in double lead role) most of the time (typical narcism to him). The length of the film is about two hours, and I'm positive the final product has every meter of the film they shot intact. To say the pace is slow would be the understatement of the year. Then again, being in B&W, the slow tempo doesn't really bother at all (well, actually my friend did fell asleep after an hour). The best scene is the invention of the magical double Tandem-Tandem handshake near the end of the film. Also, the scheme to increase the sales of the family company is simply astonishing. BTW, I still wonder where the 'X' in the title comes from...