40 Rms, No Vu

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE CHANGELING Directed by Peter Medak Screenplay by William Gray and Diana Maddox

For reasons known only to the sort of people who concoct movies like this one, a middle-aged man (George C. Scott), shattered by the sudden loss of wife and child in an accident, decides that the very place to reconstruct his life is an ancient and gloomy mansion. Of course, the minute he starts to rattle around in this real estate agent's nightmare, it starts rattling back at him -- also creaking and thumping. Obviously, it is trying to tell him something -- and not just that there is a little ranch house, a steal at the price, available down the road. Does our hero quickly throw a change of socks and underwear into a bag and take off for the nearest Holiday Inn to think things out? Not a bit of it. He is always grabbing a flashlight and poking around in the upstairs closets -- usually in the wee hours of windy nights.

Ultimately his investigatory obsession leads him to the discovery that a child was murdered in the mansion long ago. In due course, the spirit of the dead child is set to rest, the old house comes tumbling down, and Scott can presumably settle down with the rather prissy lady (Trish Van Devere) who talked him into the leasehold in the first place.

There are a couple of amusing scares, mostly of the "don't open that door" variety, but Director Medak devotes an unconscionable amount of time to vistas of long, dull corridors and high-angle shots, which prove nothing except that they just don't build 12-ft.-high ceilings any more. Too bad they don't revive that lost art and give up on this antique kind of moviemaking.

--Richard Schickel

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.