It would be disingenuous to deny that a certain element of adolescent fantasizing informs one's delight in Sanders' slithering, inexorable progress from boudoir to boudoir. But the cad's appeal runs deeper than that. Without occasional plot twists, love stories, like other fables, grow stale and treacly. We are drawn to the cad for the same reason we are drawn to unhappy endings: He offers a holiday from a romantic vision that has become excessively sentimental. He knows himself too well to believe in the permanence of his feelings, and that icy knowledge is both horrifying and seductive. The continual deconstruction of his own heart is an impulse that he has long ago given up resisting. He is all mind and body -- no spirit. Beneath his elegant accent, his tailored clothes and his seat at the Paris Opera lurks a ravenous beast. The contrast is irresistible: the cad simultaneously represents the fullest flowering of civilized behavior and its decadence.
And nobody embodied stylish decadence better than George Sanders. Even when asking a hatcheck girl for his coat, he conveyed the impression of a malevolent cat fastidiously licking its chops over the prospect of a
articularly toothsome mouse.
The definitive Sanders cad is generally considered to be Addison DeWitt, the cold-blooded theater critic he played in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's superb "All About Eve" (1950). (The role won Sanders his only Oscar.) Some sense of DeWitt's personality can be gleaned from his self-description -- although mere print can never do justice to the mellifluous Sanders voice, or the ironic hauteur of his delivery. "To those of you who do not read, attend the theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself," he purrs. "My name is Addison DeWitt. My native habitat is the theater. In it I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theater -- as ants to a picnic, as the boll weevil to a cotton field."
DeWitt spends most of his time commenting sardonically on the machinations of Eve, an aspiring actress as ruthlessly unprincipled as he is. He finds time, however, to squire around a dimwitted would-be starlet -- played, serendipitously, by Marilyn Monroe in one of her first screen appearances. DeWitt introduces his protégé as a "graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts" -- and that was when he was being nice. "You have a point," he says after Ms. Monroe unbosoms herself of a particularly inane statement. "An idiotic one, but a point."
"All About Eve," along with Hitchcock's "Rebecca," was probably the best movie Sanders ever appeared in. But DeWitt, although one of Sanders' finest roles, represents just one facet of the quintessential Sanders cad. He lacks the requisite element of sexual voraciousness; he is driven not by lust but by a desire for power. An icy, asexual manipulator, he is the apotheosis of wit, not of carnality -- which makes the film's ending, in which he blackmails Eve into becoming his mistress, disturbingly artificial.
The Sanders cad, in fact, is made up of various parts of all his lounge-lizard incarnations: the lustful impertinence of supercharged bounder Jack Favel ("Rebecca"), the sexual maneuverings of ruthless climber Georges Duroy ("The Private [Cads for all seasons: A Select George Sanders Filmography] Affairs of Bel-Ami"), the obsessive p
introduces his protégé as a "graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts" -- and that was when he was being nice. "You have a point," he says after Ms. Monroe unbosoms herself of a particularly inane statement. "An idiotic one, but a point."
"All About Eve," along with Hitchcock's "Rebecca," was probably the best movie Sanders ever appeared in. But DeWitt, although one of Sanders' finest roles, represents just one facet of the quintessential Sanders cad. He lacks the requisite element of sexual voraciousness; he is driven not by lust but by a desire for power. An icy, asexual manipulator, he is the apotheosis of wit, not of carnality -- which makes the film's ending, in which he blackmails Eve into becoming his mistress, disturbingly artificial.
The Sanders cad, in fact, is made up of various parts of all his lounge-lizard incarnations: the lustful impertinence of supercharged bounder Jack Favel ("Rebecca"), the sexual maneuverings of ruthless climber Georges Duroy ("The Private [Cads for all seasons: A Select George Sanders Filmography] Affairs of Bel-Ami"), the obsessive pre-Trump-era passion of robber baron Clemente Sabourin ("Death of a Scoundrel"), the gross, authoritarian appetites of Baron Von Tranisch (the hideous musical "Bittersweet," in which Sanders' only redeeming deed is that he kills Nelson Eddy before he can sing again).
These are not figures likely to be chosen as poster children by the Fund for the Feminist Majority, and confessing to a love for George Sanders is uncomfortably similar to admitting that one owns the complete six-video set of "Bobby Riggs' Greatest Court Triumphs." In fact, even before our enlightened age, in which moviegoers demonstrate their moral rectitude by hissing at dialogue they deem chauvinistic, Sanders' ungallant, at times explicitly misogynistic, screen persona got him in trouble.
"It was a remark I made in 'The Moon and Sixpence' which resulted in my acquiring a reputation as an authority on women," Sanders notes in his witty, guarded, oddly moving autobiography, "Memoirs of a Professional Cad" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1960). "In the film I said -- and they were Maugham's words, not mine -- something to the effect that the more you beat women the better they were for it. I thought nothing of it at the time, but several months later, when I was making another film, I suddenly found myself in the center of a storm ... a whole mass of women were up in arms against me. I begged them to see that I wasn't responsible for my own dialogue -- I just spoke the words that were given to me. The fact that on this point Gauguin, Maugham and I were in unanimous accord was, in my opinion, neither here nor there."
Not surprisingly, Tinseltown journalists seized upon the "woman hater" theme with alacrity, turning out magazine pieces on Sanders with titles like "He's Allergic to Skirts," "George Sanders Puts Women in Their Place" and "Ten Ways to Avoid Matrimony" (advice that Sanders apparently failed to implement properly, since he was married four times -- including once to Zsa Zsa Gabor and once to her sister Magda). Sanders did nothing to dispel the notion that he shared the less than enlightened views espoused by some of his on-screen characters. "If I have occasionally given brilliant performances on the screen, this was entirely due to circumstances b
