Pressure – Film Review
by Frank L

Director – Anthony Maras
Writers – David Haig, Anthony Maras
Stars – Andrew Scott, Brendan Fraser, Kerry Condon

The time is early June 1945. The location is General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s naval headquarters in Hampshire, England. Earlier in the year, a dress rehearsal for what became known as D-Day went seriously wrong. Its failure haunts Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser). The date for the invasion has been set.  Everything is ready; the one unknown is the weather. It has to be favourable to enable a seaborne invasion.

Churchill has recommended to Eisenhower that he utilise a Scottish meteorologist, Capt. James Stagg (Andrew Scott). Stagg accordingly leaves his wife, who is about to give birth to their firstborn, to advise Eisenhower. The weather forecast is far from certain, and the technology available to Stagg is rudimentary compared to what is commonplace nowadays by virtue of satellites. The stakes could not be higher. A further tension is added by the fact that Eisenhower’s American meteorologist Irving Krick (Chris Messina) and Stagg have differing personalities. In addition, they utilise entirely different technical procedures to forecast the weather. Into this cauldron of tension, there is a calming influence in the form of Eisenhower’s secretary, Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon).

The principal player is Stagg, and Scott delivers a characteristically nuanced performance. Stagg is a single-minded technician. He is not sociable. He sticks to the task in hand. He requires the staff available to him to request meteorological readings from a large number of weather stations. Reports from these weather stations pepper the proceedings. He, by force of personality, does not let Krick impede the work that he requires to be carried out. As is required, Scott is thoughtful, assertive and, apart from one outburst, calm. Fraser as Eisenhower certainly looks the part, but he seems almost two-dimensional in comparison to Scott’s Stagg. Kerry Condon is completely convincing as the very capable Kay Summersby. The film is a mere one hour and forty minutes and reaches that length with quite a substantial “Saving Private Ryan” like sequence on the Normandy beaches.

Pressure demonstrates the importance of the technical, back-room expertise in modern warfare. Interestingly, at the end of the film, it references a question that John F. Kennedy asked Eisenhower about D-Day, at his inauguration in January 1961 as President of the United States. The film quotes it at the end, saying the Allies won the war because “We had better meteorologists than the Germans.” Eisenhower’s answer is surprising, but of course he was a soldier and understood warfare, and he shows his admiration for the scientists involved. One wonders whether the current incumbent has the same admiration.