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Any WW2 action adventure involving the Norwegian resistance is Ok in my book, and this big-star saga about sabotage efforts to stop the Nazis’ atom research is a natural — much of what happens in the story is true. The show can boast marvelous locations and excellent action scenes but the script and characters aren’t very strong. Did Columbia curb epic director Anthony Mann’s greater ambitions, or did star Kirk Douglas interfere to enhance his leading character into a combo scientist, playboy and sure-shot action man? Also starring Ulla Jacobsson, Richard Harris, Michael Redgrave, and every over-fifty English name actor not nailed down.

The Heroes of Telemark

Blu-ray

Sony Home Entertainment

1965 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 130 min. / Street Date January 8, 2019

Starring: Kirk Douglas, Richard Harris, Ulla Jacobsson, Michael Redgrave, David Weston, Roy Dotrice, Anton Diffring, Ralph Michael, Eric Porter, Karel Stepanek, George Murcell, Mervyn Johns, Barry Jones, Geoffrey Keen, Robert Ayres,...

Joseph Losey’s fortunes as an expatriate director took an upswing with this efficient, nervous and somewhat overcooked thriller with a daunting ticking-bomb deadline story gimmick — alcoholic wreck Michael Redgrave has only twenty hours to save his son from execution for murder. Losey racks up the tension, but he doesn’t give a hoot for Ben Barzman’s whodunnit scripting. Just the same, it’s good to see the director finally gaining traction — from this point forward most every Losey picture received serious international attention.

Time Without Pity

Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1957 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 89 min. / Street Date October 28, 2019 / available from Powerhouse Films UK (Region Free) / £15.99

Starring: Michael Redgrave, Leo McKern, Ann Todd, Peter Cushing, Alec McCowen, Lois Maxwell, Richard Wordsworth, Joan Plowright.

Cinematography: Freddie Francis

Film Editor: Alan Osbiston

Original Music: Tristram Cary

Written by Ben Barzman from a play by Emlyn Williams

Produced by John Arnold, Leon Clore,...

In today’s film news roundup, Jodie Foster is remaking Iceland’s “Woman at War,” the Art Directors Guild honors production designers Anthony Masters and Ben Carre, “47 Meters Down: Uncaged” gets cast and Melissa Takal directs “New Year New You” for Hulu.

Project Announcement

Jodie Foster will direct, co-produce and star in an English-language remake of the thriller “Woman at War,” Iceland’s submission to the Foreign Language competition at the upcoming 91st Academy Awards.

The Icelandic movie centers on a music teacher who’s escalating her sabotage against the local aluminum industry when she discovers that her adoption application has been approved and a baby girl is awaiting her in the Ukraine. The script won the best script prize in the Critics’ Week section of the Cannes Film Festival.

Foster plans to relocate the setting to the American West. It will be her fifth directorial gig following “Money Monster,...

Going...going....

Last Remaining Copies.

Cinema Retro proudly presents this year's Movie Classics 80-page special issue: "World War II Movies of the Sixties", showcasing films that only Cinema Retro would cover in-depth. Some are true classics, others are simply vastly entertaining- and all are celebrated through rare production photos, international marketing campaigns, then-and-now location photos and little-known facts. 

Films covered in this issue:

The Guns of Navarone - Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, David Niven Battle of the Bulge- Henry Fonda, Robert Shaw, Robert Ryan Anzio- Robert Mitchum, Peter Falk The Victors- George Peppard, Eli Wallach, George Hamilton The Train- Burt Lancaster, Jeanne Moreau Tobruk-Rock Hudson, George Peppard, Nigel Davenport Hannibal Brooks- Oliver Reed, Michael J. Pollard The Devil's Brigade- William Holden, Cliff Robertson, Vince Edwards Von Ryan's Express- Frank Sinatra, Trevor Howard Operation Crossbow- George Peppard, Sophia Loren, Richard Johnson Is Paris Burning?...

War is hell, for sure, but war can make for undeniably brilliant movie-making. Here, the Guardian and Observer's critics pick the ten best

• Top 10 action movies

• Top 10 comedy movies

• Top 10 horror movies

• Top 10 sci-fi movies

• Top 10 crime movies

• Top 10 arthouse movies

• Top 10 family movies

10. Where Eagles Dare

As the second world war thriller became bogged down during the mid-60s in plodding epics like Operation Crossbow and The Heroes of Telemark, someone was needed to reintroduce a little sang-froid, some post-Le Carré espionage, and for heaven's sake, some proper macho thrills into the genre. Alistair Maclean stepped up, writing the screenplay and the novel of Where Eagles Dare simultaneously, and Brian G Hutton summoned up a better than usual cast headed by Richard Burton (Major Jonathan Smith), a still fresh-faced Clint Eastwood (Lieutenant Morris Schaffer), and the late Mary Ure (Mary Elison).

Parachuted into the German Alps, they have one...

Michael Bay is going to take another shot at directing a World War II film. For those of you who forgot, Bay previously directed Pearl Harbor, which looked cool, but could have been awesome had he built a great story around it. Maybe he will redeem himself with his this new project, called Sabotage.

The movie is set up at Paramount Picture, and it's an action thriller about the Norwegian heavy water sabotage during World War II. It will be based on Neal Bascomb's upcoming nonfiction book, Sabotage: A Genius Scientist, His Band of Young Commandos, and the Mission to to Kill Hitler's Super Bomb. Here's the description of the story, thanks to The Wrap,

Set in 1942, the story follows a brilliant scientist who flees the Gestapo to inform the Allies that the Nazis are secretly developing a nuclear program at an industrial fortress called Vermork deep in the mountainous...

News Michael Noble 15 Oct 2013 - 07:16

The mission to sabotage the Nazis' nuclear bomb project will get the TV treatment...

Danny Boyle has signed a deal with FX to create a ten-part miniseries set during the Second World War.

Teaming Boyle with his previous collaborators, producer Christian Colson and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, the project, currently titled Telemark, will retell the story of the British-backed Norwegian mission to destroy the Nazis’ nuclear weapon capabilities.

The story was previously told in the 1965 movie The Heroes of Telemark, but the team are looking forward to using the extended length of a TV series to do justice to the tale of real life derring-do.

Beaufoy has been quoted as saying that the story is "ideally suited to the slower burn and added complexity that the longer format allows", while Boyle is looking forward to working on "an epic scale".

Boyle has form for telling...

He may be hard at work on Transformers: Age of Extinction and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but we still stay awake through the night, eagerly anticipating what upcoming projects Michael Bay might infuse with his fireballs-and-toilet-humor style. Now we know: the next film from Bay will be Sabotage, a World War II thriller (and a true story) about nine Norwegian commandos who fought their way through Nazi-occupied Norway to keep Hitler from unlocking the secrets of the nuclear bomb. Based off a book proposal from author Neal Bascomb entitled “Sabotage: A Genius Scientist, His Band of Young Commandos, and the Mission to Kill Hitler’s Super Bomb” (in seeing the title in its entirety, it’s now readily apparent why the man behind Transformers signed on), Bay’s only attached as a producer for now. But according to The Wrap, he may “develop the project as a potential directing vehicle.” To...

Listen all of y'all... With an eye on his post-Transformers future, and with the bizarro Pain And Gain still in recent memory, Michael Bay has picked up the rights to a new project: a World War II action thriller about a mission to destroy a secret Nazi weapon. He is, in point of fact, scheming on a thing that's Sabotage.In a sense, the project is a new version of Anthony Mann's The Heroes Of Telemark, telling the story of the Norwegian Resistance mission to destroy the Vemork Norsk Hydro plant, where the Nazis were producing heavy water with the potential to manufacture an atomic bomb.Specifically, this version is based on an as-yet unwritten new book on the subject by popular historian Neal Bascomb. Bascomb has previously published books on the hunt for Adolf Eichmann and the Battleship Potempkin mutiny. The full title for his Telemark pitch is Sabotage: A Genius Scientist,...

More than a homage to the silent era, Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist is a dazzling tale of love and loss

What better way could one year end and another start than with a pair of charming, funny, moving films celebrating the cinema itself? Three weeks ago Martin Scorsese gave us Hugo, a deeply felt picture about the creation of the cinema in France during the final years of the 19th century. Now the French cineaste Michel Hazanavicius returns the compliment with the complementary The Artist, about the coming of sound to Hollywood. The directors of the Nouvelle Vague were born around the time the talkies began. Hazanavicius was born seven years after Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups and Godard's Breathless but is as steeped in movies as they were. His first feature film, La classe américaine, which I haven't seen, was apparently compiled entirely of clips from old Warner Brothers films,...

 

The Heroes of Telemark is director Anthony Mann's intelligent and very exciting 1965 WWII adventure that tells the true story of a daring Allied commando raid on a German heavy water plant in Norway. The destruction of the plant thwarted Hitler's goal of developing an atomic weapon. The film starred Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris. Little known fact: the movie's working title was The Unknown Battle but was changed some months before the general release. While you're at it, feast your eyes on the glorious original movie poster. They don't make 'em like that any more. The film has finally been released in America on DVD. Click here to order from Amazon.

A look at what's new on DVD and Blu-ray today:

"Taxi Driver" (1976)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

One can read about the extensive restoration of what many consider to be Martin Scorsese's finest film at The Digital Bits, but if you're a film fan, you might not need convincing to pick up the latest edition of the film about the disillusioned cabbie, which includes all the special features from the previous DVDs of the film (a feature-length making of doc, a score of shorter featurettes) while adding the commentary track between Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader that originally appeared on the 1986 Criterion laser disc. All in all, it's the definitive edition that the film deserves.

"Casino Jack" (2010)

Directed by George Hickenlooper

Released by Fox Home Entertainment

Even at the height of his powers, disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff might not have been able to...

There was a moment at the Battery Park 11 during the opening week of Christopher Nolan’s Inception—the sequence three dreams deep in the vortex where Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page are skiing across a snowy mountain to break into a military-industrial hospital, and an elevator and a van are falling various dream-levels back—when I remembered that Anthony Mann’s The Heroes of Telemark, one of my favorite discoveries in the recent Film Forum retrospective, had a remarkably similar sequence. That one had Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris skiing across a snowy mountain to break into a military-industrial scientific research facility. The two directors handled these sequences quite differently, though: Nolan’s sequence is a baroque carnival piece within a larger multi-layered logic puzzle; Mann’s sequence is a functional seventeen minutes with virtually no dialogue, so unadorned that most viewers wouldn’t have noticed that they’d just...