Gray Lady Down (1978)

the audience applauded

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Gray Lady Down is directed by David Greene and collectively adapted to screenplay by James Whittaker, Howard Sackler and Frank P. Rosenberg from the novel Event 1000 written by David Lavallee. It stars Charlton Heston, David Carradine, Stacy Keach, Ned Beatty, Stephen McHattie and Ronny Cox. Music is by Jerry Fielding and cinematography by Stevan Larner. Hanging onto the coat tails of the Disaster Movie boom of the 70s, Gray Lady Down is pretty much routine. Plot basically finds a nuclear submarine struck by a boat and sunk to the depths of the treacherous ocean floor. The crew, Captained by a bearded and gruff Heston, are naturally also teetering on the edge of doom unless the Navy can pull off a miracle salvage operation and save the day. Enter Carradine and Beatty in a new Thunderbird like device that although untried in reality, may just be up for the job?Thus from this plot onwards is a role call of robotic characterisations and adherence to the genre's formula. Men in the sub either sweat and be stoic, or crack and be sacrificed, while up above the waves the hierarchy think they know best while Carradine's unconventional Captain Gates knows otherwise. It's all very muscular, even if some of the dialogue came out of a cheese sandwich, and undeniably the effects work is decent and the suspense is pumped up for maximum impact. Yet if you have seen any other Disaster Movie from the 70s you are likely to be jaded with this "Join The Navy" advertisement. 6/10

Gray Lady Down is one of the better Seventies disaster films and it's also one of the better films that Charlton Heston did in the later part of his career starting in the Seventies. Heston like so many other of the stars of the studio era was finding fewer and fewer decent film properties to do. This was one of his better choices.Heston plays the skipper of a nuclear powered submarine which goes down in a collision. Things get further complicated when the 'gray lady' is buried partially in an undersea mudslide, blocking the escape hatch.The Naval Rescue service is on the job however, but this will prove a difficult task.The film is divided evenly between Heston and his crew as Heston tries to keep morale up that the survivors will be rescued and on the surface rescue vessel where a conflict between two captains hampers the rescue effort. Stacy Keach is the captain of the rescue vessel and his conflict is with Keith Carradine also of captain's rank who's developed a special undersea two man vessel that can scoop the dirt off the gray lady. Special mention should go to Ronny Cox who is Heston's number two and also not really getting along with him, but who steps up to the plate in a most heroic fashion.In 1978 when Gray Lady Down came out there were still memories of the submarine U.S.S. Thresher which went down in 1963 with all hands lost in one of the U.S. Navy's worst disasters at sea. A lot of what you see in this film was developed because of that tragedy.Gray Lady Down is a no nonsense sea rescue film with the impossible situations that characterized a lot of the films of this type kept out of the story. It's one of the best and yet most unsung of the disaster films of the decade. Should be seen more often. Charlton Heston and the rest of the cast do a fine job on this film.

This movie was great! The acting is outstanding. David Carridine was riveting. This was Charleton Heston's last major action movie. It has you on the edge of your seat until the very end. In particular, some unanticipated acts of altruism take your breath away. Stacey Keach plays a good part. The rest of the cast (all of whom are still alive today except for Christopher Reeve) are all very good. Do not pay any attention to the negative comments that others have left here. They simply do not make movies of this caliber very often, especially these days where everything is about sex and stupidity. This is a thinking man's movie, very realistic in a lot of respects and ahead of its time in others. I learned things and was entertained at the same time.

2/5 STARS -Eagle-eyed disaster enthusiasts should heed the warning suggested by the box copy: `made with the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, with many sequences filmed aboard the U.S.S. Cayuga and Pigeon.' Despite a strong cast and a fairly exciting premise, Grady Lady Down plays like a waterlogged Naval documentary.The submarine U.S.S. Neptune has been struck and sunk by a Norwegian freighter, and has now settled on a tenuous outcropping only feet from a two mile precipice. A hastily assembled rescue team must get a DSRV (Deep Sea Rescue Vehicle) into position to rescue the remaining survivors before either the sub is thrust into the depths by a seaquake, is crushed by enormous water pressure, is flooded by steadily leaking watertight doors, or simply runs out of oxygen.Gray Lady Down starts out with a bang (the initial collision occurs in the first fifteen minutes of the movie). Yet it rapidly becomes bogged down in the military maneuvers and sterile technicalities of the underwater rescue mission.Charlton Heston, captain of the U.S.S. Neptune, sloshes his way through the cliché-ridden script, but he pulls-off the grizzled sailor bit and treads water nonetheless. One must wonder why he accepted the part at all, though I assume that the script did not suggest just how dreary the effects would eventually become. Stacy Keach is the demanding rescue commander who contemplates his appropriate future as a B-grade television star from the comfortably dry confines of his ship. David Carradine is the quiet and contemplative designer of the experimental sub which proves critical to the mission's success, and Ned Beatty literally rounds out the cast as his overeager assistant.So little character development is required by the script that we almost don't notice that motivation is generally missing. But then Carradine's character suddenly makes a significant sacrifice, apparently motivated by nothing other than his quiet on-screen demeanor, and we realize that we've been cheated. Only Heston manages to infuse his character with a hint of emotional growth, although much of that might have been the dark circles under his eyes which grew larger as the movie progressed.The external special effects are somewhat uneven. The underwater effects get better and better as the tension builds, and the sub scenes near the climax are resolutely convincing. But the director blew his budget on the money shots, and we are left with a variety of somewhat less important but much more confusing images elsewhere, such as the opening shadows that only hazily suggest the catastrophic collision.Based on the book Incident 1000, Gray Lady Down does indeed feel like the stilted conversion of a paperback thriller. Relentlessly long underwater maneuvering sequences probably began as exciting lines on the printed page. But watching David Carradine sweat in a cramped submarine through four separate rescue dives to 1450 feet couldn't be less interesting.The biggest problem is that some of the best effects are also the most boring, such as that of a robotic arm placing a `shape charge' into the carefully selected nook of an undersea boulder. Although the swirling waters of the ocean are well-represented, the sight of the arm selecting just the right spot, for minute after endless minute, begs the question: who cares?Special effects inside the doomed sub are few and far between, but first rate. Of course, it's pretty difficult to screw up spray from an off-camera fire hose, but `Beyond the Poseidon Adventure' proves that it can be done.Gray Lady Down is good for a single viewing, if just for the special effects and Heston's routine performance. War-hero wannabes will be delighted, disaster buffs will be mildly entertained, and everyone else will be bored to tears. Gray Lady Down's compelling premise is ultimately sunk by two dimensional characters that never transcend a lifeless script, culled from the pages of a dime store thriller.*** Celebrity spotlight: keep your eyes open for a pre-Superman Christopher Reeves aboard the bridge with Stacy Keach.