As if the economy and the sad state of his favorite sports team weren't enough, a man now has something new to cry about. The movie Antwone Fisher opened late last month, and all over the country men are honking into their handkerchiefs as the movie ends with a crawl saying, "In memory of my father ... "

The film is a virtual fatherfest, with Denzel Washington (who also directed) playing a psychiatrist-father figure to the title character, a mixed-up (and fatherless) Navy seaman played by Derek Luke. One surefire audience grabber occurs at a Thanksgiving dinner, when the seaman recites a poem that begins, "Who will cry for the little boy?" Later the manly psychiatrist (who has no children himself) tells Antwone, "I love you, son." And a scene at the end that includes a grandmother sitting at a groaning table and croaking, "Welcome," is bound to choke up any holdouts.

"That one gets everyone," said Joy Bryant, who plays Antwone's love interest. She watched the movie in a screening room with a group of men. "Men kind of have this shifting-in-the- seats thing, a lot of umm-umm, frog-in-the-throat to keep from crying," she said. "And some men really bawled. One big manly celebrity, a young cute stud, came up to me with his eyes bloodshot. He said, 'I tried to hold it in, and I couldn't take it anymore -- wah!' "

Sure, women cry at movies, but as men are wont to say, women cry at anything. Men have traditionally cried less often and less hard, and even after decades of urging by therapists (and women) for them to express their feelings, most men still feel that crying shows a loss of manliness.

Antwone Fisher is the latest of a subgenre, the male weepie -- others include Field of Dreams, Saving Private Ryan, Bang the Drum Slowly and Braveheart -- that un-dam the waterworks. Its popularity raises a question: What does it take to make strong men cry?

Randolph R. Cornelius, a professor of psychology at Vassar, has studied the matter under laboratory conditions. He showed men films like Peege, a 1972 short about visiting a grandmother in a nursing home, and what he considers the champion male weepie, Brian's Song, a 1971 television movie about an interracial friendship between two Chicago Bears, one of whom dies. (In his lab, women get the death scene from Steel Magnolias.) Women cry when they are angry or frustrated, Cornelius said, or when there are conflicts in a relationship. "Men cry more in situations involving loss," he said, "or about re-establishing connections."

Terrence Real, a psychotherapist at the Family Institute of Cambridge in Watertown, Mass., echoed that conclusion. "What men think about when they cry are the losses, the missed opportunities, the missed connections with other people," he said. "They have regrets about bad behavior, like drinking, or being too angry, or not being with their kids enough. And their issues with their fathers."

He added: "Women continue making friends all through life. As men grow older, they have fewer friends. So as they go down the conveyor belt of life, they cry more."

Movies open floodgates

American men, mind you, more than hold their own in the international crying Olympics. A study in 29 countries completed in 1999 found that American male college students cried 1.9 times a month on average, half as often as American female college students but tied for first place with Nepalese male college students.

Many men are more likely to grow teary watching a movie or a television drama -- even a Hallmark commercial -- than in real life, even after a wrenching event like a parent's death.

"That's the power of movies," Cornelius said. Not only do they take place in the dark, where men feel safe, he said, "but they can create this alternative life space in which we express our emotions, and they are freer and less complicated than our real lives."

The movies that bring on men's tears, Cornelius said, are in essence about male bonding -- losing or winning at sports, sacrifice on the battlefield, or losing or gaining a father. "Ordinary People was a real tear-jerker for men," he said. "A boy says, 'I love you,' to his father at the very end. As the lights came on, every man in the house wiped his eyes very quickly."

It's easy to say some men fear being seen as wimps. But something about men's tears is itself upsetting. Consider how CNN handled footage of Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa choking back tears for a full minute before speaking about his friend Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash in October. Before rolling the tape, CNN issued a viewer discretion advisory. Sen. Harkin "gets very emotional," cautioned the anchor, Wolf Blitzer, who added, "I just want to issue that alert to those of you who may not want to watch this."

It was as if the sight of a man's tears threatened viewers' own composure, implying that the social order itself was in danger.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, when national figures like President Bush and Dan Rather shed tears publicly, a number of commentators noted how far society had come in allowing men to express emotions publicly. They contrasted those displays with the moment in the 1972 presidential primary campaign when Sen. Edmund S. Muskie was shown apparently crying over speculation about his wife's mental health. (Shortly after, Muskie withdrew from the contest.)

Many sports fans feel that there has been an upswing in the number of male athletes shedding tears. Whereas it was big news in 1989 when Mike Schmidt broke down on retiring from the Phillies, it seemed almost commonplace by 1999, when wide receiver Cris Carter and his fellow Vikings cried over losing the National Football Conference title to the Atlanta Falcons. The same year, quarterback John Elway cried several times when he announced he was retiring from the Denver Broncos. More recently, John Franco, the Mets reliever, cried after suffering what could be a career-ending injury.

Many men cry when an Olympic athlete steps onto the winners' stand to the strains of a national anthem. "In that context, a man crying has a certain kind of legitimacy, a nobility," Cornelius said. "People think if a man is crying, something really deep must have happened."

Shape up, man

Then there is Douglas McGrath, the director of the movies Emma and Nicholas Nickleby, who says he cries at almost anything. "I'll be in bed at night with my wife," he said, "and a rerun of I Love Lucy starts, and just as the heart is closing around the title, the tears well up in my eyes." Why? He thinks it's because of the contrast between the triumph of love of the fictional Desi and Lucy, and the fact that they broke up in real life. Now that's a sensitive guy!

But for most men it is the father-centric films like Antwone Fisher or books and plays with father figures, like Tuesdays With Morrie, that get to men the way Old Yeller breaks up young boys. As Real puts it: "Want to see men cry? You put them together in a room where they feel safe, give them a facilitator and have him ask them, 'When I think of my father, I ... ' "

This moment of free-flowing men's tears may be coming to an end, though.

"I see it changing back," Cornelius said. "We are moving into a more of a 'You've got to tough it out' phase as our culture is preparing us for war and there will be a lot of sacrifices. It's like, 'We've got to get through all this, and there's no crying about it.' "