247 Gray Lady Down

[MichaelB]

GRAY LADY DOWN
(David Greene, 1978)
Release date: 18 October 2021
Limited Edition Blu-ray (UK Blu-ray premiere)

In Gray Lady Down, the race is on to rescue a crew of sailors after a nuclear submarine collides with a Norwegian freighter and becomes stranded on the seabed. Skilful direction from David Greene (The People Next Door) and top-tier performances by Charlton Heston, David Carradine, Stacy Keach, Ned Beatty, Stephen McHattie, and Ronny Cox combine to make this the definitive disaster film.

Pre-order here.

INDICATOR LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES

• High Definition remaster
• Original mono audio
• Audio commentary with film historian Peter Tonguette (2021)
• The Guardian Interview with Charlton Heston (1985, 75 mins): archival audio recording of the great actor in conversation with Quentin Falk at the National Film Theatre, London
• Lady’s Man (2021, 12 mins): actor Stacy Keach recalls his role as the dashing captain leading the rescue
• The Changing Tide (2021, 8 mins): character actor Stephen McHattie remembers working with a great team
• Plumbing the Depths (2021, 41 mins): film historian and former Navy officer Alan K Rode on the US Navy Submarine Rescue Program
• Original theatrical trailer
• TV spot
• Radio spots
• Image gallery: promotional and publicity material
• New and improved English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
• Limited edition exclusive 32-page booklet with a new essay by Omar Ahmed, archival articles on the film, an overview of contemporary critical responses, and film credits
• UK premiere on Blu-ray
• Limited edition of 3,000 copies

#PHILTD247
BBFC cert: PG
REGION B
EAN: 5060697921816

[domino harvey]

Haven’t seen this, but didn’t realize Stephen McHattie had been making movies since the 70s!

[MichaelB]

He's also in The People Next Door (1970).

[JamesF]

Or Look What Happened To Rosemary’s Baby!

[Finch]

Is this film any good? Out of October's line up this is the only one I'm intrigued by, and then only because of Carradine and Keach though re-reading the blurb, I see it also has Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox!

[Thornycroft]

I watched it a couple of years ago and found it thoroughly mediocre. Certainly far less exciting than the poster. I don't recall any of the character actors that fill out the cast really getting a chance to shine, though to be honest most of the film slipped from my memory within a week of seeing it.

[colinr0380]

Re: Stephen McHattie's early roles. I have always wanted to see the astonishing-looking Moving Violation since seeing the trailer in one of those Trailer Trauma compilation sets!

[MichaelB]

Final specs:

[MichaelB]

CineSavant - and I'm especially pleased that he singled out the Alan K. Rode featurette, as we're all very pleased with how that turned out. Are there any other film critics with a professional submarine rescue background?

[domino harvey]

Wow, I only know him from his noir work, that’s pretty neat

[MichaelB]

As you can tell from the 41-minute running time, he had a lot to say!

And he visibly relishes saying it; I don't imagine he had any idea that he'd ever be asked to turn this experience into a Blu-ray featurette.

[Finch]

Gray Beaver Down

[MichaelB]

CineOutsider.

[sabbath]

When David Carradine's submersible communicates with Charlton Heston's submarine using Morse code, the English SDH show the actual messages with dots and dashes!

[MichaelB]

I think you're the first person to have spotted those!

Indicator has always had a longstanding policy of, where feasible*, transcribing foreign-language dialogue instead of just falling back on the usual cop-out "(SPEAKING FRENCH)" or, worse, "(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)", and as soon as I realised that the Morse Code was the real transcribable thing instead of just random dots and dashes...

...well, I thought "why not?"

(*"Feasible" generally means text normally written in the Roman alphabet, although the Russian part of Verdi's Hymn of the Nations, an extra on City of Fear, includes two-line subs with Cyrillic text on line one and a transliteration on line two, as it felt a bit weird to transcribe all the other languages and then cop out with Russian.)

[domino harvey]

I don't remember which film it was, but I had a good chuckle at Kino Lorber's disc subtitles for a section of an English language film that was in the most elementary, universally known French possible (Like, "Oui, monsieur" level) and the subs only said "SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE"... like, c'mon, at least listen to it first!

[MichaelB]

I consider a subtitle track an abject failure if I have to use "(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)" - at the very least I try to identify the language being spoken, even if it's not practical to transcribe it.

Although of course I sometimes have to make judgement calls - I don't imagine for a millisecond that the subtitle "(SPEAKING ANCIENT EGYPTIAN)" in The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb is in any way accurate, but that's clearly the narrative intention so I went along with it. And Tom Baker cheerfully owned up to the fact that the "Arabic" that he spoke in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad was literal gibberish.

Although I had more of a dilemma with Shanghai Express, whose Chinese extras are clearly speaking Cantonese rather than a situationally plausible Mandarin (I don't speak either language, but I've watched enough films in Cantonese and Mandarin to appreciate the surprisingly substantial tonal difference) - I don't imagine Josef von Sternberg cared what they were speaking, as long as it sounded Chinese. So with those, I felt that "(SPEAKING CHINESE)" was the best solution - I mean, that is at least correct, even if I'd normally favour greater precision.