A solid disaster thriller that gets going early on and never loses track of the situation. I find submarine-set films all quite similar and this doesn't really break any new ground, but it has a good ensemble cast - you don't often see David Carradine in this kind of film, for example - and a nice attention to detail that works. Some of the model work is a little dated but that's normal for the 1970s.

When Egyptian culture was at its height, hieroglyphics included a pictograph of the palm of a hand, fingers outstretched. As Egypt declined over the course of a thousand years, the glyph of the hand grew sloppier and sloppier until it became nothing more than a triangle on its side. This process of repetition, aging, and carelessness is known as decadence. Not to worry about the hand-turned-triangle though. The Phoenicians picked it up and turned it into the letter "D" in our alphabet.

No such luck with the disaster-movie genre. It just got more repetitive, aged, and sloppy until it finally died except for a few horrid gasps during agonal respiration, of which this is an example.

It's not worth going on about, really. The plot is full of holes, beginning with the first few minutes, when a cargo ship whose radar is on the blink in a great fog decides to stay on course and speed anyway. No warning toots of the whistles or anything. Chuck Heston is the captain of a surfaced nuclear submarine returning to New London. His radar has picked up the approaching ship but he decides to plow ahead anyway, or maybe he changes course, the plot is as murky on this point as the all-encompassing fog. What's the distance of the target?, asks Heston. One thousand yards. Then -- BLAM -- it's on top of them and cutting the aft end of the boat off. Those thousand yards take about ten seconds to cover. That's one hundred yards per second, if my pocket calculator isn't lying again.

The characterizations are disjointed. Ronnie Cox is the Executive Officer who suddenly, and without adumbration, begins to skin Heston alive for being a pompous show off. Then the outburst is forgotten and dropped. I don't know why the scene is in there unless it's that the writers figured that every movie about a submarine in distress must have a crew member who goes berserk.

The script gives no hint of Navy protocol. An anonymous seaman hails Heston as he's about to climb a ladder. "Hey, Captain, when are we going to get out of here?" Just like that -- "Hey, Captain." The special effects are poor, usually so dark that it's hard to see what's actually going on. And I don't think there's an unpredictable moment in the movie. We know well ahead of time that SOMEBODY is going to have to die to save the others. In fact, we get two helpings of that.

The acting from the principals is all right. Heston ought to know how to be authoritative by now. And he's given some finely textured performances, even when he's not wearing robes and sandals, as he did in "Will Penny." But he's not really given anything to do because of the multitude of supporting players, and some of them are positively embarrassing.

I hate to say it because I like Heston, a good actor and a man of principle, even if I disagree with some of his later principles. But the truth is, this isn't a very good movie.

Watching this rescue-of-a-sinking-sub film back in the day, it must have felt kind of redundant in the wake of THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972) and AIRPORT’ 77 (1977); that said, it didn’t hinder movie mogul Lew Grade from financing a production not long after depicting the biggest (fictional) rescue operation of all time with RAISE THE TITANIC (1980) – which, incidentally, is a title I haven’t watched in some time!

In any case, GRAY LADY DOWN is as much a drama detailing the plight of the sub’s constantly diminishing crew, commandeered by the oh-so-stoic Charlton Heston, as a showcase for novel sea exploration/rescue techniques (in the form of a mini-sub armed with sonar and camera designed and maneuvered by David Carradine). The tension arises out of the fact that the damaged vessel is slipping ever downwards due to the water level inside and the unstable surface where it’s been lodged; added to this, however, is antagonism going on both above and below the surface (between Carradine and Stacy Keach, the officer in charge of the rescue operation, and between Heston and Ronny Cox, the man who was supposed to relieve him of duty, respectively). Also in the cast is Ned Beatty as Carradine’s long-suffering chubby pal and Christopher Reeve (in his film debut) as Keach’s young aide; interestingly, the two would be re-united soon after for SUPERMAN (1978)!

The film is aided by nice Widescreen photography and a serviceable score by Jerry Fielding, but let down somewhat by overlength (the repetitive and draggy nature of events tending towards a general dullness). However, as I said in reviews of some of the other disaster movies I’ve been watching of late, while most of these were pretty much dismissed when originally released, with time, have achieved an undeniable campy charm (amusingly, at one point the submerged crew choose to watch JAWS [1975] – conveniently, also a Universal production – as a means of respite from their current dilemma, but especially when Heston proclaims in desperation: “I feel like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest!”).