The Heroes of Telemark

During the German occupation of Norway in 1942, the Nazis take over a plant in the Telemark region to produce heavy water, a substance needed for building an atomic bomb. A physicist at the University of Oslo notices the accelerated production and works with a resistance fighter to warn the Allies. Their efforts bring a small commando force to Norway with orders to destroy the plant and stop the German program.

Anthony Mann directed the film, the twentieth of the twenty features he made, following The Fall of the Roman Empire a year earlier. Kirk Douglas plays Dr. Rolf Pedersen and Richard Harris plays the resistance leader Knut Straud, with Ulla Jacobsson, Michael Redgrave, David Weston and Anton Diffring among a credited cast of thirty-three. The screenplay is by Ivan Moffat and Ben Barzman, and Benjamin Fisz produced for The Rank Organisation and Benton Film Productions.

The film runs 131 minutes and was released in November 1965. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.5 from around 9,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 6.9 from 188 votes. The larger vote count on the first and the smaller, higher figure on the second suggest a steady, modest response rather than a widely celebrated one.