The Heroes of Telemark (Benton Film Productions, The Rank Organisation, Columbia, 1965; U.S. release, 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, August 30) my husband Charles and I watched one entry in the Turner Classic Movies “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to actor Kirk Douglas: The Heroes of Telemark, produced by a British company called Benton Film Productions in association with The Rank Organisation in 1965, released in the U.K. that year and in the U.S. by Columbia in 1966. It was basically a knock-off of The Guns of Navarone (1961), with Douglas in essentially the Gregory Peck role of the leader of a group of commandos assigned to destroy a particularly important piece of infrastructure for the Nazi war effort. The Heroes of Telemark was at least ostensibly based on a true story that took place in Norway in 1942. The Germans were using the Norsk Hydro power plant in Telemark, Norway to produce heavy water for their program to develop an atomic bomb. From my grade-school and high-school chemistry classes I remembered that hydrogen atoms come in three isotopes: standard hydrogen, whose nucleus contains one proton and no neutrons; deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, with a nucleus of one proton and one neutron; and tritium, with one proton and two neutrons. Heavy water is simply water made with deuterium atoms instead of normal hydrogen atoms, and it’s useful in the production of nuclear energy (and, hence, nuclear weapons) as a moderator in nuclear reactors because it already has a neutron and therefore doesn’t absorb neutrons needed to continue the fission reaction the way ordinary water does. The Heroes of Telemark was loosely based on two books about the sabotage operation aimed at destroying the Germans’ ability to produce heavy water in Norway, Knut Hauklied’s Skis Against the Atom (the memoir of the original for Richard Harris’s character) and John Drummond’s novel But For These Men, though the actual script was by Ivan Moffat and Ben Barzman with an uncredited assist from Harold Pinter, of all people.

The film was directed by Anthony Mann, and he was able to get Kirk Douglas to play the lead because Douglas felt guilty about having fired Mann from the job of directing Spartacus (1960) – Stanley Kubrick replaced him, the only time in Kubrick’s career he worked as a director for hire taking over a project conceived by someone else. So when Mann offered him the lead in The Heroes of Telemark, Douglas accepted without even bothering to read the script. The film cast Douglas as Rolf Petersen, a physics professor at the University of Oslo who’s approached by Knut Strand (Richard Harris), a leader in the Norwegian Resistance to Nazi occupation, with drawings of the Norsk Hydro plant’s equipment for producing heavy water. Rolf looks at the drawings and immediately decides he needs to take a trip to England to show the officials of the British government that the Nazis are producing heavy water in Norway for a potential atomic bomb. The two and some of their Resistance buddies hijack a ship, the Galtesund, traveling up the Norwegian coast and commandeer the crew into sailing it to England despite the hazards of mines – one of which Rolf bats away from the ship with a long grappling pole, which provokes a joke from Knut about him playing billiards with mines. The ship makes it to England and Rolf gives the British government his briefing, and they authorize an operation to destroy the heavy water-making gear (the film includes a number of closeups of heavy water dripping down out of a lab-tank faucet, enough to establish it as the real star of this film). Rolf and Knut ski through the Norwegian countryside (well, it’s Norway around Christmastime, so how else are they going to get around, especially before snowmobiles existed?) and reach the hut of a fellow Resistance member, only to find that the Nazis have been there first, burned it to the ground and presumably murdered its inhabitant. So they have to keep going for two more days until they reach the home of Rolf’s ex-wife Anna (Ulla Jacobsson), and it becomes clear both to Anna and us that Rolf wants to change the “ex-” part of that.

We also meet the rest of Knut’s commando team, including Arne (David Weston) and Oli (Alan Howard), and of course the moment we learn that Oli’s wife Sigrid (Jennifer Hilary) is pregnant with his child, we know he’s going to be a-goner during the operation, as indeed he is. Midway through the movie the plane carrying 50 British commandos into Norway crashes and burns, so even though there are only nine of them left the Norwegian Resistance fighters decided to carry out the operation themselves, wearing British uniforms so if they’re captured the Germans won’t carry out wholesale revenge killings against the Norwegian population. Midway through the movie the team successfully infiltrates the factory and blows up the tanks for making heavy water with a long, snake-like stretch of C4 explosive that Rolf threads between the tanks to make sure they are all obliterated (“Is that the slow fuse or the quick fuse?” I joked, referencing Blazing Saddles). Only that turns out to be a false climax because the Nazis had a spare set of tanks ready in Germany – which both Charles and I spotted as a major plot hole because if the Germans already had the equipment to produce heavy water in their own country, why did they have to schlep themselves and their equipment to Norway to do it? Unless there’s some important mineral to the production of heavy water that Germany doesn’t have and Norway does, this makes no sense. Michael Redgrave appears in the film as Knut’s uncle, who gets shot by the Germans as he tries to hold them off with a shotgun.

There’s also a character identified merely as “Quisling” (this became a standard term for collaborators after Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian prime minister who agreed to head the Germans’ puppet government) who stumbles onto the Resistance fighters when he’s out in the countryside hunting. He pleads with them that he’s on the side of the Resistance because his wife is the daughter of a major Resistance leader and for that reason the Nazis put her in a concentration camp. Rolf wants to shoot him immediately but the others talk him out of it, saying that that would make them no better than the Nazis. As it turns out, Rolf was right; the Quisling eventually rats them out to the Nazis when they agree (not that they have any intention of doing so!) to set his wife free if he gives them the information. Ultimately the commandos learn that the Nazis have created enough heavy water for their nuclear program and plan to ship it out of Telemark on a series of freight trains that can be loaded onto a ferryboat and sailed to Germany. So it’s up to our intrepid Norwegians to sneak bombs onto the ferryboat and blow it up before it can reach Germany, and as if to ramp up the tension as well as the moral dilemmas Rolf spots Sigrid (ya remember Sigrid?) and her newborn baby boarding the ferry. Rolf gets on the ferry himself, paying for his fare with spare change because he didn’t have a ticket, and in order to save all the children on board he organizes a game called “Lifejacket” in which the kids all congregate on the end of the ferry, as far away from the bombs as possible, and race to put on their lifejackets so they’ll be easy to rescue when the bomb goes off and destroys the ferry. The Heroes of Telemark is an O.K. movie with some surprisingly ponderous moments – it’s the sort of story that took its makers two hours and 15 minutes when a classic-era director and writing team could have polished it off in an hour and a half – and the real-life model for the scientist Kirk Douglas played denounced it as almost wholly fictional. But it has a certain haunting quality and it’s surprising how credible Kirk Douglas, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants to the U.S. (his birth name was Issur Danielovitch), looks as a Scandinavian. (Well, he’d already played a Scandinavian in The Vikings seven years earlier.)