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In Winslet and DiCaprio, Cameron has the two most captivating young performers around. And they deliver knockout performances, giving the film a magical momentum. With her haughty, troubled look, Winslet's Rose chafes against the restrictions of her class and sex from the start, while DiCaprio's Jack is the embodiment of impish freedom. The scene where the two dance jigs at a lower-deck party is close to pure joy. Cameron's portrayal of the rich as selfish and venal is crude, but in the grace of his two lead characters he endorses an aristocracy of the spirit.

Oddly, despite its blockbuster livery, Titanic is most successful as a comedy of manners. When the ship goes down it is almost a disappointment. And you could argue that Cameron, determined to record the full agonising duration of the demise, overextends these sequences. But that would be harsh on scenes of a graphic force rarely matched. From the outset, Cameron shows the ship in all its finery and vastness, yet also vulnerability. There are heart-rending sights - an old couple clinging together on their bed, a mother comforting her children with a final story. But it is a sound that lingers most: the cries of the drowning, the sort of wail you imagine rising off the Styx.

It is too early to judge Titanic fully (it won't be released here until January). But what impresses most at first sight is its melding of old-fashioned, rollicking adventure and romance with more serious concerns. The movie is a ride, and not without the odd moment of corniness. But it's also about freedom and flight, bondage and stagnation. And most fittingly, as a memorial itself, it's about memory and the act of remembering.

When Titanic was finally played to the top brass of Twentieth Century Fox, the company which largely financed the film, many of the senior executives openly wept. The film is, indeed, moving, but the feeling is that the tears were mainly of relief. The most expensive film in movie history had become a nightmare of overrun budgets, frayed tempers and lurid headlines. In the public's eyes - thanks to a wholly ignorant media - the movie was close to being written off as a disaster, as another Waterworld. Before that private screening on October 31, Fox didn't know what, if anything, it would get for its investment - whether Cameron would be bringing it a trick or a treat.

To get an idea of the scale of the production it's necessary to play the numbers game. The budget is estimated at anything from $200 million upwards (some say $280 million, and counting). Interest on overruns alone, after the US release date was postponed from July to December, is said to have amounted to $10 million. All this paid for, among other things, a tank containing 17 million gallons of water, in which to float a 775 ft, 90 per cent scale replica ship. In addition to this, the film's 400 special-effects shots cost $110 million. The film needs to earn $400 million worldwide to make a profit.

Even these frightening figures do not tell the full story of the gruelling Titanic shoot. There were accidents (though no more serious than to be expected on a project of this magnitude, we're assured), tales of extras coming close to hypothermia from staying in the water, reports of rifts. And then there was the strange affair of the spiked lobster chowder, in which the cast and crew's grub was said to have been laced with a hallucinogenic called PCP, leaving many of them reeling with psychedelic visions.

^{Credit: Twentieth Century Fox}

Some say, though, that working for Jim Cameron has that insanity-simulating effect anyway. It was his obsessive vision that drove the project from the start. "Film-making is war . . . a battle between business and aesthetics," Cameron, who sometimes seems to have missed his destiny as a field marshall, has said. And he fought every inch of the way for his film. When a senior Fox executive flew to the set in Mexico to seek cutbacks on the project, Cameron told him: "If you want to cut my film, you'll have to fire me." And he added, showing that his flair for melodrama doesn't confine itself to film, "To fire me, you'll have to kill me."

It may be an irony that a film about a sombre symbol of human complacency was made by a man not renowned for humility. But if genius, as Samuel Butler suggested, is a supreme capacity for taking trouble, Cameron is some kind of genius. Titanic is a monument to taking pains, perhaps unparalleled in movies. Moved by a fealty to the dead, awakened he says by trips to the buried wreck, Cameron pledged to get the movie as accurate as humanly possible. The replica of the ship was built from the blueprints of the original, released for the first time by Harland & Wolff, Belfast.

Cameron's greatest gift as a film-maker is his talent for welding and reworking traditional genres: his Aliens (1986), for instance, with its mixture of intimate details of a grunt's life with sci-fi, was like a marriage between Sam Fuller and Howard Hawks in monster mode; True Lies (1994) reinvented the spy genre for the Nineties. Now he has fused adventure with romance, avoiding the failings of past Titanic movies. Before, the ship itself had always loomed over the human drama, creating a stolid genre of its own.

This succession of sinking ventures started with Atlantic, in 1929, and included a 1940 German anti-British propaganda picture, a couple of recent television films, and Lew Grade's 1980 flop thriller Raise the Titanic!. By a long way the best of the earlier efforts was A Night to Remember (1955), but its account is strangely piano, as if the film itself was following the "don't panic" orders which were the undemonstrative ideal of the ship's officers. And, being composed in the old, square-shaped screen format, it can't match Cameron's visual scope.

The story of the Titanic will no doubt continue to fascinate film-makers and writers for generations to come. When the ship went down, a great symbol for artists of every stripe arose: of human pride and arrogance, of the limits of technology, of the ending Edwardian age and the dawning century, of death. Last year Beryl Bainbridge's novel Every Man for Himself seemed to see the disaster as a symptom of capitalism. Bainbridge also touched on the sense of dishonour among the survivors, the feeling described by Rose in the film, now an old woman (and movingly played by Gloria Stuart, a star of the Thirties and Forties), as a wait "for an absolution that would never come".

For Cameron, forgiveness may be nearer at hand. As an 11-year-old in Canada, he was moved by David Lean's Dr Zhivago, and always hoped to make something of similar sweep. With its gargantuan budget and ambition, Titanic took him into territory where few other film-makers - maybe only Cecil B DeMille, DW Griffith, David O Selznick and Lean - have ventured. It was one of the great gambles in movie history.

Amazingly, it seems to have come off.

This review was published in the Telegraph on November 20, 1997

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