It happens occasionally that I discover that a movie I worked on as a script translator is now available in this country. In the case of Gold Run, the movie has in fact been out for a couple years and I hadn’t noticed it. So I watched it over the weekend.

I think what I did on this one was actually an editing job. If I remember right, the script had been translated by AI, but back then the production people were still willing to run it past actual human beings, to avoid major incoherence. I think I worked the whole script, and I thought it was a pretty good one.

Viewing it did not disappoint. This is a solid, exciting film.

Movie fans interested in the subject have been able, in the past few years, to get a pretty good education about the Norwegian response to the German invasion in 1940 . The King’s Choice (which I didn’t work on) and Atlantic Crossing (which I did) told the story of the royal family, on the crown prince’s and crown princess’ sides respectively. Narvik (which I also worked on) told the story of the doomed military defense. And now Gold Run follows another important facet of the story – the (genuinely) amazing story of how the Norwegian government managed to get its entire gold reserve to the coast and off to England, with the Germans on their heels.

The unlikely hero of the story is Fredrik Haslund (Jon Øigarden), a financial secretary for the Norwegian Labor Party. As the bigwigs (Labor is in power) rush to get out of Oslo, they dump the job of evacuating the gold onto Fredrik’s narrow shoulders. Somehow, with the help of an exasperated army officer and his troops, he manages to get the boxes of gold onto trucks to transport to Lillehammer, where they think it will be safe. But the Germans keep coming, so it all has to be put on a train for transportation to the coast. Fredrik is an OCD type, and there’s dark humor in the way he insists on checking every box off his inventory before it can be transferred (multiple times) from one place to another – even with German fighter planes overhead.

For a more assertive – if secondary – protagonist, we also have Fredrik’s sister Nini, who is, we are told, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and whom I suspect to be entirely fictional, added solely for purposes of inclusivity. Also there’s the poet Nordahl Grieg, who did exist (though he didn’t look like this). His Wikipedia page says he was on the gold ship, though I don’t know if he was actually as much involved in the gold run as this movie makes him. Grieg was a committed Communist and a stalwart supporter of Stalin, by the way.

There’s also a nice subplot about a nerdy bank teller and a rugged truck driver thrown together by chance or fate, who learn to respect each other through shared dangers.

And dangers there are. The closer they get to the coast, the closer the German planes are, until we see Fredrik and Nini breaking into a bank in Ålesund with a battering ram as the city burns around them.

This is the first time I’ve seen a film I’ve translated that was exactly like the script I worked on. And it’s quite a good script. This is a very solid, exciting war movie.

My only disappointment was a personal issue I’d forgotten. At the end, Nordahl Grieg reads one of his own poems, about the feeling of being conquered, and vowing to come back again someday. When I translated the script, I composed a lyrical translation of that poem which I thought was quite good. I had the whisper of a dream that when the film was made, somebody would notice how good my translation was and use my words in the subtitles.

Alas, as I pretty much expected, it was not to be. The lyrics they use are a literal translation (and flat wrong in one line).

Ah well.

I do recommend Gold Run. I saw it on Amazon Prime, where I had to pay a rental fee.