Excellent, Without a doubt!!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

THE HEROES OF TELEMARK is a late entry in the cycle of British war movies that reached its apotheosis in the mid-Fifties with THE DAM BUSTERS (1953) and others.Made by the Rank Organization, with an American star and a director with a proved track record of war movies and westerns, THE HEROES OF TELEMARK tells the story of the Norwegian Resistance and their campaign to destroy a plant manufacturing "heavy water," - i.e. material that could help to create the atom bomb. At first the Resistance blows up the plant, but when that scheme fails, they end up destroying a ferry carrying the "heavy water" across a fjord on the first stage of its long journey to Germany. The fact that some innocent passengers get killed as well is part of what might be called collateral damage.There are some obvious stereotypes here, especially in director Anthony Mann's portrayal of the Germans, who all speak English in accents reminiscent of the comic officers in the Eighties sitcom ALLO ALLO ("We hev vays of mekink you talk"). Anton Diffring has a small role as Major Frick, but it is not really developed in any way.By contrast the Resistance fighters, led by Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris, are portrayed as indefatigable, fearless in the face of impossible odds, and totally committed to their cause. Their characters are likewise not really developed: Douglas does his usual turn of a stone-faced hero, while Harris reveals some of the rebel- like qualities characteristic of THIS SPORTING LIFE (1963). Michael Redgrave has a cameo role as a pipe-and-slippers type, who is ultimately provoked into defending his property.In truth the film is mostly memorable for its action sequences. Shot in Norway, it contains some spectacular moments where the Germans pursue the Resistance fighters on skis across rolling mountain landscapes. Later on Harris and Douglas have great fun trying to plant explosives in the doomed ferry, while listening out all the while for potential intruders.We all know what the film's outcome will be; but it proceeds to that predictable conclusion in highly entertaining fashion.

Kirk Douglas, Richard Harris, Ulla Jacobbson, and their fellow Norwegians certainly look good in those dazzling Scandinavian sweaters, as they go about destroying Germany's supply of the atomic-bomb facilitating element called heavy water.It's called "heavy water" because, although it looks and acts like water, and you can wash your face with it, it's heavier than water. Instead of having two plain hydrogen atoms combined with one plain oxygen atom (H20), one or two of the hydrogen atoms carry a neutron. That's what makes it so heavy. And it's now called deuterium oxide (D2O).Why -- you, the discerning and curious viewer want to know -- why is it important in making nuclear fission happen? I don't know. Neither does Richard Harris, the Norwegian nationalist who demands an answer from Norwegian physicist Kirk Douglas. Why should the commando team call in bombers to destroy the plant, along with the hundreds of innocent civilians living next to it? Douglas scribbles D20 on a piece of paper and holds it up before Harris, then whips it away. "You'll never understand," he says, or words to that effect.Douglas is certainly right, if that's the only explanation he's going to offer us. And the screenwriters were correct too. The point of this movie isn't to explain nuclear fission. They don't even bother to show us the mousetraps going off seriatim. The point is to show us an action movie in which the heroes win, though not without sacrifice. Objective achieved.It's not particularly good, though. In 1961, "The Guns of Navarone", a big splashy tale of a team of experts sent on a dangerous mission into enemy territory, was a big success, and there followed the usual spate of big splashy tales following the same pattern. "The Heroes of Telemark" was just one of several, no better or worse than the other imitations. In this one, men stumble around in waist-deep snow, ski after one another, rappel down mountainsides, and every time a gun is fired we hear the same ricochet on the sound track -- Ptew-woo-woo-woo. The dialog does not coruscate.But the movie has its plus side. It was actually shot in Telemark, a rustic area of Norway that is very cold in the winter. Anthony Mann is a competent director and doesn't try to overwhelm us with the kind of camera tricks that have now become fashionable. That cross-country ski chase, with a traitor trying to shoot down Douglas, is handled so matter-of-factly that it looks like what it's supposed to be. And Malcolm Arnold's martial score doesn't shatter our ear drums, and it's used sparingly. The important events really happened. They're not fictional.There must be the inevitable dramatization. Douglas happens to run into his ex wife, Jacobbson, who looks like she'd be lots of fun to run into, and there is a fist fight, and Michael Redgrave has nothing to do but get shot and die with dignity. The children are snatched from the jaws of death at the end, which they didn't in real life.Anyone interested in the facts is advised to check out "The Real Heroes of Telemark", available free on YouTube.

Many of the criticisms of this film I've read here have been based on its apparent historical inaccuracy. I really don't give a hang about that. (If I want to learn history I'll READ.) Rather, my complaints are with the movie as purely an entertainment piece, which is all it was probably ever meant to be. You would think that any film featuring Kirk Douglas paired with Richard Harris could be terrific. But this is just somehow flat. Neither really gets up to capacity and the story tends to get dragged down, often by utterly irrelevant personal background details.In the end, you just don't get the Hooray! feeling that you should after watching a 130 minute film about a couple of guys who saved the world from -gulp- Germans! You're just glad it's over and want to go to the bathroom.

Recently visited the Country of Norway and became interested in the area of Telemark where my tour guide told me about this true story concerning the production of heavy water which the Nazi's needed for their experiments in developing an atomic bomb. The photography in Norway is outstanding and clearly shows the Fjord in which all this action took place and the type of ferry that was utilized during WW II. Kirk Douglas,(Dr. Rolf Pedersen) was a scientist at the University of Oslo, Norway and his knowledge was needed by the Resistance movement in Norway and his life changed completely in working with England and America to make attempts to destroy this plant at Telemark. Hollywood added some romance in this picture between Dr. Rolf and his ex-wife, Anna Pedersen, (Ulla Jacobsson) and also great acting by Richard Harris,(Knut Straud) This film clearly shows how the Norwegian people were controlled by Hitler's Nazi's and how brave men and women did everything in their power to defeat their horrible control of human life.