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.
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.