The Box is a major cultural and heritage attraction and archive, which opened in Plymouth’s city centre in September 2020. Its collection, formally the South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA), is the regional film archive for the South West of England, comprising the combined programme libraries of Westward Television and Television South West (TSW). It also includes a significant number of donated film collections dating back to the early 1890s.
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Kirk Douglas plays a Telemark Hero
Kirk Douglas likes the seaside town of Weymouth except the weather.
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Overview
Filmed at Weymouth in a Fair Isle knitted hat, Kirk Douglas appears for interview while on a location shoot on the water for a famous war film. Based on a true story The Heroes of Telemark (1965) is a British Eastmancolor film directed by Anthony Mann and is the true story of a group of Norwegian resistance fighters who during the Second World War destroy the Norsk Hydoelectric plant in Telemark, southern Norway dashing Nazi hopes of producing an atomic bomb.
Kirk Douglas plays the physicist Rolf Pedersen drawn into the sabotage by resistance fighter Knut Straud played by Richard Harris. The plant produced heavy water or deuterium oxide and Nazi Germany was close to acquiring it. Operation Gunnerside began on 17 February 1943 when six fighters entered the almost impregnable plant and set explosives in the plantroom. According to the Internet Movie Database IMDb there are a litany of small errors in the film but it is shown regularly and also stars Michael Redgrave. Kirk Douglas was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia (now Belarus) and grew up in New York. His film career spans 60 years and he appears in over 90 movies including Spartacus (1960).
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