“Laugh, and the whole world laughs with you,” Grandma used to say. “Cry, and you cry alone.”

Sorry, Grams, but starting this weekend, large groups of Americans will be sobbing in unison throughout the country (and not just because Britney Spears’ tour was canceled). No, the flood of tears will be caused by “The Notebook,” an unabashed tear-jerker opening nationwide, which practically comes with a warning to bring a surplus of tissues.

Apparently, you’re going to need them to get through this sentimental tale, which looks to place itself in the Weepie Hall of Fame, right up there with four-hankie flicks such as “Terms of Endearment,” “Love Story,” “Beaches” and “Steel Magnolias.”

It has already released a torrent of tears even before opening.

At the opening night of the Seattle International Film Festival, screenwriter Jeremy Leven introduced the film by noting that, in advance showings, many people blamed the pollen count for their sniffling throughout the film, according to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). New York tabloids reported that several celebrities attending a screening were so overcome with heaving sobs that they were unable to attend the movie’s after-party. (Imagine that: real tears from actors! So many tears that they weren’t able to guzzle free drinks and take home their goodie bags!)

For those of you who like a good movie-induced crying jag, this has to be good news. “The Notebook” is based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks, no stranger to the sad love story (“A Walk To Remember” and “Message in a Bottle”). In “The Notebook,” an older man reads aloud from a notebook to an invalid older woman he visits in the hospital. The notebook’s story is about a couple separated by World War II, then passionately reunited after taking different paths.

Eventually the movie reveals that the elderly man is reading to his dementia-afflicted wife, who is the young woman in the stories.

Sound sad enough? It does to Jeanine Basinger, film professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, who says “The Notebook” has the right elements for a classic weepie.

“As an audience, we don’t get the chance to meet many space aliens or comic superheroes. But we do know about love and death,” she said. “In today’s moviegoing world, a lot of the movies are detached from what we know to be everyday life and reality. They’re special-effects-generated; they’re big; and they’re fun. But the movie that comes out and really connects to something we know about draws in an audience. And when the audience gets there, it releases tears.”

Hollywood has had a long and illustrious romance with tears. There was a time when the big studios specialized in films that aimed not to leave a dry eye in the house. Think “Dark Victory” and “Imitation of Life,” and you get the idea. The weepie was pure melodrama, and clearly in the woman’s domain.

“The old woman’s film was grounded, as unrealistic as it might have been, in actual female concerns of men, motherhood and marriage,” said Basinger, considered one of the nation’s top cinema scholars.

“However glamorized her life was in those movies, there was some essential failure in the woman’s life: a romance that goes wrong, the child who dies, the husband who dies, a love is lost in some way. And the woman has nothing, and she has to get out and do it for herself.”

There are, clearly, subgenres of the weepie. Pet-related weepies: “Old Yeller,” “Where the Red Fern Grows,” “Sounder” and the “Lassie” movies. War-related weepies: “Glory,” “Gallipoli” and “Saving Private Ryan.” Guy- and sports-related weepies: “Pride of the Yankees,” “Bang the Drum Slowly” and, perhaps the greatest guy tear-gusher, “Field of Dreams.”

Essential to the tear-inducing effects of these heart-renders is something very simple, according to Basinger: “Love and death are the two main categories,” she said. “They can have all kinds of generic settings – love and death in war, in the Wild West, in the fashion world.”

If it seems like the golden age of the weepie is long gone, there’s a reason. “They used to make them better because they made more of them,” Basinger said. Still, she said, “weepies is a form that has never gone away. It just hasn’t been as popular or done as well in the movies. But it has been done well consistently in television, on Lifetime and with the TV movies of the week. All that “I’ve got a disease,’ “My husband left me for a cheerleader.’ And soap operas do that too.”

Maybe “The Notebook” will herald a return to the classic weepie format on the big screen. Basinger thinks the film’s advertising cleverly focuses on the young stars, an attempt to lure a younger audience. But it will be an older audience, she predicts, who will respond to “The Notebook.”

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Either way, the film looks to have a lot of people reaching for the Kleenex. And as moviegoers, we like that, Basinger said.

“Why do we like a good cry? Catharsis. Sometimes when we go to the movies, we want escape. We want to go to where people are rich and drink champagne and sing and dance. But sometimes we want to go into our own emotions and what we’re feeling – to see someone else experience loss, pain, unrequited love,” she said. “For anyone out there who wants to bawl their eyes out, this will be it. Let’s face it, there aren’t many tears in “Dodgeball.”‘

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