Word: telemarking
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...turned to modern melodrama in his last films, and made some mistakes. For careful balancing of expansive exterior composition, he substituted that betenoir of camera technique, the zoom lens, with its infinite capacity for making an audience think suspense is present when none actually exists. In The Heroes of Telemark, some corny zoom technique was at least in part redeemed by controlled visual construction and a sensible linear narrative. Perhaps A Dandy In Aspic could have similarly transcended its endless zooms to close-ups of anguished eyeballs and urban details; unfortunately, director Mann died three weeks before shooting was completed...
...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...
Hollywood has always been technically expert. It has found the rare director worthy of its resources in Anthony Mann; whose Heroes of Telemark is the sleeper of the year...
...full of beauty. Red Desert is the best parallel I can think of for its consistently dazzling composition. Mann's use of Western landscape has won him the adulation of French critics, some of whom vote his Man of the West one of the all time greats. In Telemark, he is working with snowcapes, and he proves his versatility beyond question...