Cold Front

The Heroes of Telemark bundles up the cast in woolly Norwegian ski sweaters, which is one way to pinpoint a drama's geographical center. The film was made in bleak, craggy Rjukan, Norway, site of the heavy-water plant marked for destruction in 1943 by a small band of Norwegian Resistance fighters in order to delay Germany's development of an atomic bomb.

Telemark is a palm-dampener when exiled Norseman Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris first parachute into the white northern wastes and go whooshing silently across the slopes, pursued by a gunner in a light plane or spectral Nazi ski troops. Director Anthony Mann (El Cid) makes the rest of the action, and the acting, seem quick-frozen. Too often chased indoors, Douglas confronts his ex-Wife Ulla Jacobsson, who appears eager to forgive his intervening philandering, and her kindly Uncle Michael Redgrave, who lends a touch of headmasterish solemnity, as if to prove that the Allied cause is just.

During long debates about love, war and marriage, the drama loses any sense of immediacy. One situation-ethics crisis concerns whether or not to give London the go-ahead for a bombing raid that may destroy a village of 6,000 people, but Director Mann, curiously enough, makes a greater issue of blowing up a ferryboat. Since no movie can ultimately create real suspense about who won World War II, the only pertinent question becomes How. Tele-mark's answer is to pit Douglas and his right-makes-might pals against a Nazi elite force so inept that its final defeat looks suspiciously like a snow job.

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