After posting about Goodnight Mr Tom and also mentioning the Railway Children, it was gratifying to find that lots of you out there also succumb at the 'Daddy my Daddy' scene at the end of the film. At first watching that was the moment where I burst into tears, on further watching it was the scene at Bobby's birthday party, later on it was...well, all of it really and now I cannot hear the theme tune in the first five minutes without welling up.
I have always been a weeper at movies. Any version of Little Woman when it comes to Beth dying reduces me to a sodden heap, Brief Encounter ('Alec can you ever forgive me' 'I'll forgive you if you forgive me' cue Rachmaninoff second piano concerto) another two tissue watch, the old black and white version of A Christmas Carol with Alastair Sim as Scrooge, still the best one in my opinion, and Tiny Tim's 'God Bless us Every one' guaranteed to set me off (mark you, the Muppet Christmas Carol with a baby Kermit as Tiny Tim also does it), the list is endless.
Every Saturday night when we were kids my mum, my sister and I went to the local flea pit and it was at the Century Cinema (now demolished and Camden Town Hall built on top) that I saw a film that really was 
the biggest weepie ever. Called Miracle in the Rain it starred Jane Wyman and Van Johnson and told the story of a lonely woman living with her mother in New York who meets and falls in love with an American soldier. They only have a short time together before he goes off to fight taking with him a cross she gives him to wear and, inevitably, he is killed. She is distraught and grief stricken and becomes ill and in the middle of a thundering rain storm, feverish and with a soaring temperature, she makes her way to her local church and prays that he comes back to her because she loves him so much. Then the screen went all wobbly, like it used to do in old black and white movies, and there he was telling her he loved her and asking her to take care of the cross she gave him. He kisses her and then disappears and she collapses on the altar steps where she is found by her mother and the priest. She is dead. Her mother sees she is clutching something in her hand and when she prises open her fingers, there is the cross that her dead lover had been wearing when he was killed. At this stage the rain stopped and the sun came out and that was the end of the film.
Yes, it sounds totally over the top I know, but I tell you my mother, my sister and I were absolutely shaking with sobs by the time the film finished. We had reached the hiccuping stage, we all had swollen eyes and sore throats and, this was pre-Kleenex day, we had one small hankie between us and it was totally sodden and we actually rang it out when we got home. I have never forgotten that film and in checking it out tonight, find it is available on DVD. I shall have to get it again and wallow, nothing for it.
Many years later another film reduced me to the same state, this time I was watching with my daughter Kathryn, and my husband came into the room where we were watching TV, took one look at us, said O my God, and left. The film was Truly, Madly Deeply and Juliet Stephenson was simply heartbreaking. A real five star weepie.
My younger daughter, Helen, never cries at movies. I don't know why, she just doesn't and I was beginning to think I had raised a creature with a heart of stone and then we went to see ET. Success! that did it and she was in tears, nothing of course compared to her mother who when ET says 'Ouch' at the end of the movie, touches his heart and hugs Eliot, dissolved into a puddle on the floor, but still there were real tears and I thought 'That's my gal'.
I could go on all night about the movies that have turned me into a sodden wreck but I will refrain from boring you further. However, I would like to know what reduces all you lovely blogpeople to a weeping 
heap be it in the cinema or on the TV so that I can take comfort in the fact I am not the only watering pot around.
One film I have not mentioned which traumatised an entire generation, of which I was one, is of course Bambi. I remember having to be carted out of the cinema, howling, and even now I cannot watch the death of his mother as I get into such a state. I have yet to meet anybody who does not find this deeply upsetting. Walt has a lot to answer for....
