At times feeling like Airport '77 without the plane or the all-star cast, 1978's Gray Lady Down came out in the dog days of the disaster genre when Charlton Heston's career as a big screen leading man was on its last legs, and there's a sense of tired routine to this tale of a sub stranded on an unstable ocean ledge after a collision with a fishing vessel. The last major submarine movie until The Hunt for Red October, it suffers the problems of most peacetime submarine movies. Without the standard can't fail wartime dramatics of the genre – depth charges, torpedoes, silent running et al – it's a pretty static affair with Heston and his crew spending most of the film sitting around waiting to be rescued while Stacy Keach hovers around the rescue ship's control room and David Carradine and Ned Beatty sit around watching from their prototype mini-sub in murky model shots.<br /><br />A lot of money has been spent, but to little effect. David Greene's flat direction doesn't disguise the fact that there's little in the way of tension while at times you can't help wondering if the price of the Navy's co-operation was eliminating any possible drama from the script in the fear it might make them look bad. The film does briefly raise the possibility of conflict between Heston and Ronny Cox's ExO over responsibility for the accident only to quickly let the matter drop lest anyone get the impression that not all of the navy's sub commanders are at the top of their game.<br /><br />Christopher Reeve has a couple of lines in a bit part and it's nice to briefly see Heston's War Lord co-star Rosemary Forsyth as his wife even if all but one of her scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, but the film remains a pedestrian time-filler. Even Jerry Fielding adds nothing much to the proceedings with his TV movie-style score, bizarrely built around the Carol of the Bells.