The misanthrope's corner.

THE Titanic is one of the two things that make me cry (the other is "La Marseillaise"). It's also the only thing that can make me knock off work and ignore a deadline. Whenever the 1952 movie starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck comes on TV, I drop everything and prepare to dissolve.

I have a first-hand connection to the Titanic. My father was taken by his father to Belfast to watch her being built. He used to tell me about it, then launch into the story of the doomed voyage, wiping away a few tears of his own while my irrepressible mother interjected, "Why didn't they put it in low and pump the brakes?"

As I write this, I have just seen the latest Titanic movie, the CBS two-part miniseries starring George C. Scott as Captain E. J. Smith. Scott, of course, was superb, and so were the navigation scenes, but I didn't shed a tear, and frequently yelled at the TV with the choleric abandon I usually reserve for network news.

A comparison of the various Titanic movies reveals more about our current cultural confusion, spiritual brittleness, and artistic mediocrity than the endless symposia on values emanating from conservative think tanks.

The 1952 movie with Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck is a personal drama with a nautical backdrop. Webb plays a rich American expatriate and bon vivant who married poor-girl Stanwyck and made a fashionable lady of her -- but at a price. His cold sophistication and sharp tongue have hurt her once too often, and she has gotten even by making him rock another man's cradle. Norman, the 13-year-old son he adores, is not his child.

Stanwyck has left Webb and is taking Norman and his older sister back to America on the Titanic, but Webb books passage at the last minute and demands custody of Norman. In the bitter argument that ensues, she blurts out, "He is not your son." She immediately regrets it, but it's too late. To her guilty horror, Webb takes it out on the boy, changing overnight from a loving father to a snarling stranger.

On the night of the disaster, Norman is put into a lifeboat with his mother and sister, but longing for his father and conscious of wearing his first pair of long pants, he gives his seat to a woman and returns to the ship.

As the lifeboat rows away, the band on deck begins to play "Danny Boy." Stanwyck, looking around in panic, realizes her son is not in the boat and gives a despairing scream. Up on the foundering ship, Webb finds Norman and tells a crewman to put him in a lifeboat, but the last one has just left. The lesson of "the sins of the fathers" could not be made clearer.

The movie ends on the theme of "Greater love hath no man than to give up his life for a friend." Gazing worshipfully at his father, Norman says, "I thought we could make a swim of it together, sir." Webb embraces him and replies, "I've been proud of you every day of your life, but never so much as I am at this moment. I feel as tall as a mountain." As the band plays "Nearer My God to Thee," Webb and the boy, their arms round each other, sing the hymn with the stranded passengers -- John Jacob Astor, Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus, men in white tie and coal-blackened stevedores -- until the end comes.

The 1958 British documentary A Night to Remember is an excellent film, but it contains the first hint of something that was destined to get worse. Once again the band plays "Nearer My God to Thee," but instead of the melodious church version heard in the earlier movie, they inexplicably play the complex choral arrangement. Not surprisingly, the passengers do not sing.

The made-for-TV R.M.S. Titanic came out in the late Eighties and starred Donald Sutherland. Told from the viewpoint of liberal academics in second class, it was predictably political, and had the Countess of Rothes, who displayed such courage in the lifeboats, fondling herself in the Turkish bath. It was also factually off: the ballroom dances were surreal slow-motion shots completely unrelated to the lively turkey trots and bunny hugs of 1912.

This movie had no "Nearer My God to Thee" at all. The band played a dreary dirge called "Autumn." Here we have a curious arbitrary bow to historical accuracy. At the inquiry held after the disaster, some survivors testified that the band played "Nearer My God to Thee," while some said it was "Autumn," described in several Titanic books as an "Episcopal hymn." I never heard of it, but I do know the difference between spring and fall. Why would the band, playing on an April night for people about to die, choose the mournful "Autumn"? They were playing without sheet music -- could they possibly have known this obscure number by heart?

THE new CBS miniseries also gives us "Autumn," along with a band that has been reduced to a string sextet whose thin efforts are barely audible. The emasculation of this scene over the years is a perfect example of the movie industry's conscious refusal to let people have their cultural myths. We needn't look far for the reason. If I can respond emotionally to a full-throated rendition of "Nearer My God to Thee" with every atheistic fiber of my being, imagine the effect it would have on millions less warped. The resulting spiritual rejuvenation would bankrupt the sex-and-violence business overnight.

The CBS miniseries also tries to downplay first-class passengers and give equal time to steerage, but it doesn't work. Tragedy is supposed to discriminate. Audiences have always been more interested in the high and mighty because they fall farther and harder: it simply makes for better theater. As Aristotle said in his rules for the classical drama, tragedy is what happens to the best people; melodrama is what happens to the rest.

The CBS Titanic is more faithful to the rule laid down by Oscar Wilde: "One would have to have a heart of stone to read Dickens's account of the death of Little Nell without bursting out laughing."