Flood Watch : Get ready for an onslaught of new films guaranteed to make you cry.

Just thinking of Streisand tousling Redford’s hair one last time starts my eyes welling. And how about “Here’s looking at you, kid,” in a black-and-white airport in Morocco? Or those shots in the forest confirming our worst fear: Bambi has lost his mother.

What’s right in all these pictures? They have made us cry, and it’s exactly what the filmmakers wanted. “As a moviegoer, I pay for emotion!”enthuses director Jonathan Demme, who takes pure pleasure in our crying at his work as well. Odd that we should choose to pay $8 to feel pain when we can do it every day for free.

“Most of us are too busy these days to feel deeply for either the rest of humanity or even to reflect on our own lives,” notes Los Angeles psychiatrist Dr. Roger Gould. “So sitting in a movie theater emoting can be extremely healthy.”

That’s good news for a surprisingly high number of unabashedly emotional recent films, among them: “One True Thing,” starring Meryl Streep, about a family dealing with a terminal illness; “What Dreams May Come,” starring Robin Williams in a tale of love and death in the afterlife; “Simon Birch,” a fable about the life and death of a special child; and “The Mighty,” about two outcasts who form a powerful bond.

Other weepers on their way include Demme’s “Beloved,” starring Oprah Winfrey, based on Toni Morrison’s emotionally devastating novel; “Meet Joe Black,” starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins in what Hopkins has described as a “big, weepy, beautiful film”; and “Stepmom,” starring Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon in a story involving illness and parenting.

Actually, the signs of a four-hanky revival have been in the air since “Titanic” swept onto the scene, grabbing us most urgently with the tragic love story at its center. “City of Angels” did excellent business earlier this year with sentiment being fallen angel Nicolas Cage’s weapon of choice. The Cinderella story “Ever After” was one of the summer’s surprise hits. Even the action-adventure movie “Deep Impact” did big business based as much on its heart-wrenching personal stories as its special effects.

“The studios are finally getting that there’s a real audience for so-called emotional, character films,” says Bonnie Bruckheimer, who, with her partner Bette Midler, produced “Beaches” and is developing the summer’s blockbuster book “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.” “People more than ever have the need to feel something, and the studios are putting out more development money for these kinds of films.”

Shirking the Stigma of Being a Downer

With all that, some are reluctant to wear the label of “tear-jerker,” or the description “melodramatic” that often accompanies these movies. Fearing the cynical, high-tech generation will steer clear of something that seems an out-and-out downer, movie marketers are being extremely careful about giving us the laughter and the high points in trailers and ads, knowing full well what happened to a film like “Marvin’s Room.” (Despite good reviews and a cast including Streep, Diane Keaton and Leonardo DiCaprio, no one believed it was about anything but cancer.)

“I think those of us who make these kinds of movies want them seen as celebrations of life,” says Wendy Finerman, producer of both “Forrest Gump” and the upcoming “Stepmom,” which opens in December. Some of the latter’s trailers already have its studio concerned that some people might view the film as purely about loss rather than a funny-sad story about two very different women coming together against all odds.

“I originally saw the story as a mother’s worst nightmare,” Finerman says. “Crying is not a requirement, although I think audiences will experience all emotions.”

There was a time when “tear-jerker” and “melodrama” were positive in connotation--particularly in their most fertile period of the ‘40s and into the ‘50s, during which actresses (Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward, Olivia DeHavilland, Barbara Stanwyck) took turns taking home Oscars for the most tears shed. As a consequence, the weepie became synonymous with “women’s films,” based on the movies being centered around women, reaching audiences that were largely female, and the pre-feminist belief that only gals were allowed to cry in public.

Movies being dictated by their times, the raging ‘60s saw the almost complete absence of the front-to-back weepie, unless one considers “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” whose relentlessly drippy sentiments seemed preposterously out of touch. But with the touchy-feely ‘70s came the crack in the rebellion, starting with the mother of all tear-jerkers, “Love Story” (1970). Somehow it worked and we cried a decade’s worth of pent-up tears.

“I suppose it was the right film at the right time,” says its director, Arthur Hiller, “but I think it would work again today if done right. Because it’s a universal theme: Boy loves girl, girl loves boy, something comes between. It’s Romeo and Juliet, it’s boy goes off to war, it’s disease strikes. The crucial thing is for the audience to love the characters.”

It’s Tough to Remake Emotional Classics

The floodgates were open, so to speak, and less stellar attempts followed. Some, like Bette Midler’s remake of “Stella Dallas” (“Stella”) were laughed, rather than cried, out of theaters. “The truth is, it probably wouldn’t work in this day and age, but the main lesson we learned was you don’t remake that kind of movie when it’s great,” producer Bruckheimer says. “I think the people who remade ‘An Affair to Remember’ [renamed “Love Affair” starring Warren Beatty] would agree.”

Filmmakers also realized you just couldn’t do maudlin for maudlin’s sake. There had to be a full-fledged story around it, a dramatic structure peppered with laughter and the real stuff of life. “The Way We Were” (1973) and “Terms of Endearment” (1983) were models of the well-rounded cathartic experience: Yes, the tears came, and, yes, the audience’s strings were being pulled, but there was enough richness in the total experience that people not only didn’t resent it, they reveled in it.

Both those films were extremely conscious of not letting the potential drippiness get in the way. The director of “The Way We Were,” Sydney Pollack, in fact, had creative differences with star Barbra Streisand over one scene in which she returns to her alma mater and sits in her car watching a new generation’s rabble-rouser stand where she once stood.

The scene is silent, except for Streisand crying in the car. Pollack felt because it followed another weepy scene (the official breakup after the birth of the baby) and preceded the famous final one, the tears were negating each other. It was excised in the theaters but Streisand got her scene when the movie went to cable.

With “Terms of Endearment,” as well, the key to its success as a great tear-jerker was how it often played against the obvious sentiment. Producer Polly Platt had owned the property and spent years trying to adapt the book before finally partnering with a guy fresh out of sitcoms named James Brooks.

“I was just stymied by the cancer and the death in the book,” Platt admits. “I could not imagine doing it with humor, and I only saw it as having two protagonists, the mother and daughter. But Jim took the character of a retired Army general and turned him into the astronaut played by Jack Nicholson and the work of a master had begun.”

Platt says she and Brooks were always aware of its sappy potential, but chose to play it subtly, with touches such as Shirley MacLaine’s hair gradually growing unruly and grayer. “I knew if my daughter were dying, I wouldn’t have time to get my hair cut,” Platt says. “And Jim always knew when you could wring laughs from even the most tragic situations. Like Shirley saying, “Give her the shot!” which on paper seems sad and angry. But the way he shot it, and the way he built the emotion, he got the laugh, which ultimately made way for the tears. That could have been a secondary, manipulative movie if not for Jim.”

Striking a Balance Keeps Story Believable

The dilemma remains even truer today when audiences are savvy to every obvious pulling of a director’s strings. Chris Columbus, who started as a director of comedies, feels his background helps “Stepmom” find the right balance: “Even in the most tragic situations, there is humor,” Columbus says. “People are roaring with laughter throughout [at preview test screenings], and then the last 20 minutes there is sobbing, so it’s actually working for people.”

And when it works, suddenly, the timing seems perfect. “Every year when a movie comes out and touches people, we say the timing is right,” says Stephen Simon, a producer who has tried for 20 years to get “What Dreams May Come” made. The movie opened well last week with $16 million in box-office business. “But I really do feel that the time is right for a film like ours. People seem very open to emotions because of the millennium consciousness. It’s bringing up a lot of fears--which the disaster movies have played into--but I think there is real hope and longing under those fears.”

Choosing a director against type also may determine how well these films work emotionally. Having Mimi Leder direct “Deep Impact” probably led to a softening of what could have been pure hardware. Carl Franklin, a director whom Streep describes as “muscular” in style, also has helped “One True Thing” keep its sappiness in check.

Getting male and female viewers to be willing to show their emotions is another matter: “If you get the men to cry, you probably have a mass-audience movie,” producer Finerman claims. They may like their drippiness drenched in action, and peppered with more than the usual dose of reality, but when they come, you’re talking blockbuster.”

“What ‘Titanic’ became was a movie where it was OK to cry out loud,” says Jon Landau, one of its producers. “And I mean the teenage boy and the grown man as well. You didn’t really have that before, and I think it’s because the movie was about real life and the characters felt and looked real. It wasn’t a fanciful love story that [pulled] your chains.”

Demme felt audiences--male and female--cried during his film “Philadelphia” not only because someone they’d grown to care about was dying but because it was about something real, frightening and confusing to many. Columbus chose to direct “Stepmom” because he had lost a parent shortly before--”I had to do it so I could move on with my life”--and says that probably makes it more real not only for him but for the audience as well. “I think you can become sentimental when you have more distance [from] things, like high school or whatever,” he says. “That’s when a movie can get manipulative and sappy. But I think because this one felt so raw for me, the emotions are more honest.”

The folks behind “Dancing About Architecture,” which stars Angelina Jolie, Dennis Quaid, Gena Rowlands and Sean Connery and opens in December, feel they have the ideal movie for the whole family to weep at together.

Multiple love stories, leading to a surprising finish, plenty of laughter, but ultimately, emotion. “I don’t care how stoic you are,” says its executive producer, Paul Feldsher, “this will be a real challenge for people not to cry. When we were casting it, we’d even cry when bad actors did their readings.”

Get out your handkerchiefs.