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Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris in a WWII movie makes for a great way to spend a rainy afternoon and fans of post war films (Guns of Navarone, Desert Rats) will find this worth watching. It has beautiful scenic views of Norway but is too long by half. Anton Diffring, who made a career of playing Nazi bad guys, is fun to watch. The rest of the cast delivers drab performances in a predictable script that underwhelms. Loosely based on the real saboteurs in the Norway resistance who attempted to stop the Germans from producing heavy water (which is never really explained as a component in the development of the atom bomb). Douglas is typically cool, earnest and smouldering in his winter Dunoon jacket. (You're gonna' want one.)

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.

Twenty years after the end of the war they were still churning out stuff like this, more or less scraping the bottom of the barrel for 'unknown' incidents to exploit. The events depicted here may well have been true but Anthony Mann does little or nothing to inject any life or excitement into things. For me the attraction was third-billed Michael Redgrave but he was totally wasted in a part even Richard Pascoe couldn't make more lifeless. For a film about heavy water there's a notable lack of chemistry between ANY one person and ANY one else; an 'action' film short on action, a thriller short on thrills in fact the whole thing is a snow job.