Titanic movies probably reveal more about the times they were made than the year the boat sank. In the 1933 movie of Coward's Cavalcade, it's a numinous moment in the years leading up to the great war and the depression. The 1943 German Titanic, a special project of Josef Goebbels, is anti-British propaganda on an epic scale, attacking corrupt British capitalism and celebrating German heroism. The 1953 Hollywood film Titanic endorses American family values of the Eisenhower era, and the 1958 A Night to Remember (based on Walter Lord's excellent book) scrupulously dramatises the events, underlining British sang-froid and noting the useful legislation it promoted. Cameron's 1997 picture sets off the American spirit of love, youth, equality and scepticism against British snobbery, complacency and crippling attachment to tradition which have had a baleful effect on the United States.

Cameron's plot differs little from Road to Rio (or A Night at the Opera), except that its story of a shipboard romance between people from different classes, one of them faced with a forced marriage, ends up with the liner sinking rather than reaching port. But it is, I now recognise, an amazing spectacle, a picture touched with grandeur, though it gains nothing from 3D. If you're pushed for time, or the current tsunami of Titanicana is getting you down, I suggest you just see Roy Baker's sober A Night to Remember (rereleased in a new print, and containing brief clips from the wartime German picture) and read Joseph Conrad's two eloquent, insightful essays that appeared in the English Review just weeks after the sinking and were reprinted in his Notes on Life and Letters.