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The Heroes of Telemark (1965)
Rate:
5
Viewed:
5/24
5/24:
Unbelievably, given the similarities, The Heroes of Telemark can't be exciting enough to be the poor man's
Where Eagles Dare.
Instead of Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, it's Richard Harris and Kirk Douglas, but they ended up hurting the film so
much by hating each other. Watching them on screen, it's apparent that they didn't want to acknowledge each other.
In fact, when Kirk Douglas first showed up, he asked Richard Harris, "Are you going to be as difficult as they say you are?"
which was met with a quick response: "Are you going to be as big a bastard as they say you are?" They used to arrive at the
movie set in separate Jaguars. Then, one day, Richard Harris came in a Rolls Royce which pissed off his co-star who
therefore refused to work until he was accorded the similar treatment.
Meanwhile, in spite of being shot on location in Norway, the action is too dull to fire me up just like how
Where Eagles Dare did. There have been promises at times only to let me down all
the way through from start to finish. Occasionally, I'm left in disbelief at the impossibility of some moments like Kirk
Douglas, who plays an ordinary doctor of physics turned James Bond, getting away from a couple dozen Nazis on skis and
moving around as if nothing happened after he's shot near where his Achilles' heel is. Even the Nazis' security at the
factory is so lax that I've doubted their seriousness about making the atomic bomb possible. Plus, I can see the freedom
fighters in the dark when they can't.
Forget the story; it's mostly fake. The real act of sabotage was successful with nary a gunshot fired the entire time.
After it happened, the Nazis didn't know they were planning to do it and took several months to recover from the setback
to get the heavy water production going again. However, it's moot because the plan, if successfully implemented, wouldn't
have worked as the Nazis were still long ways off from producing a working atomic bomb, thanks to the brain
drain that Germany experienced when the best of the best left the country for good after WWII broke out. To be fair,
nobody on the Allied side at the time knew it.
All in all, Richard Harris and Kirk Douglas are fine in The Heroes of Telemark, but I wish it was
more like Where Eagles Dare, that's all.