A rare, dull disaster film--rare in that Irwin Allen had absolutely nothing to do with it. GRAY LADY DOWN manages to take an interesting subject and transform it into celluloid Valium. There isn't one turn or twist that we haven't seen several times before, so the movie is as suspenseful as a Donald Duck cartoon but not nearly so entertaining. Heston is his usual stoical self as the captain of a nuclear submarine that is teetering, crippled, on a shaky precipice at the bottom of the ocean. If the sub goes over the side, it will sink even deeper, the hull will crack from the water pressure, and all hands will be lost--only about an hour out of Hartford. Keach is put in charge of the rescue operation. Aboard the ship, Harewood, the ship's second officer, goes berserk from the pressure (or was it from Heston's bad acting?). The crew is in radio contact with Keach while Carradine, a retired naval man, and Beatty descend into the depths in Carradine's experimental bathyscape, the Snark. Do we have to tell you whether they live or die? Based on a novel that had to be better than this film, GRAY LADY DOWN lost money at the box office, and rightly so. It is, to coin a term, substandard. If you watch this movie as a comedy, you may laugh a great deal.