The Heroes of Telemark

A war film set in Norway. The country is occupied. The Germans have taken a plant. The plant sits beside a hydroelectric station. Heavy water is produced there. A resistance man learns of it. He takes what he has to a scientist. Rolf is a physicist. He looks at the figures and understands what they mean: this production is for a bomb programme. Word goes to London. From there the film is a story of sabotage. An airborne attempt is made first and fails. Then a team is formed. Norwegian soldiers go up the mountain on skis. The winter is very hard. The team waits on the mountain for weeks and cannot find food. The plant is above a gorge. The single approach is guarded; the team chooses to climb from the valley. The raid is made. The Germans rebuild the production and this time decide to move the material out of the country. The last section takes place on a ferry. The shipment will cross a lake and there are civilians aboard. What the narrative is interested in is not heroism but calculation: its hardest question is whether to let civilians die, and that the man deciding decides alone. The landscape is inside the narrative. It was shot in Norway in a real winter and the skiing is not done on a stage. The real operation was smaller in scale. The film merges some events and adds a romantic line; that was criticised in Norway. Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris are constantly in conflict and that tension is the spine. Anthony Mann directed; it is among the last films he completed. Kirk Douglas, Richard Harris, Ulla Jacobsson, Michael Redgrave and Anton Diffring are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1960s war films and snow. Who it is not for: anyone expecting historical accuracy; the narrative fits the event into a Hollywood shape and simplifies what the real team did.