This is the style that Andre Dubus, whose new collection of short stories, “Dancing After Hours,” has just been published by Knopf, has mastered, and that has made him one of the great psychological realists among contemporary writers of short fiction. It is not a voice that will immediately appeal to those who like their sentences red-hot. It lacks rhetorical sizzle, and its quotidian omniscience, its even, quietly lyrical, familiar tone, seems to link it uncomfortably to the middlebrow, to the realm of received ideas. But it endures, a steady literary tortoise when the hares have run off the track.

And it goes deep: Nakedness allows no equivocation. At times Dubus’ writing almost resembles a kind of imaginative therapy session: It is as if he had decided that only by enacting the most painful and intimate emotional moments in life could he learn their lessons. Indeed, throughout his career Dubus has created such an enduring, profoundly decent persona that the reader feels certain that he knows the man himself. And, perhaps more important, that he likes him.

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Dubus’ overarching theme is married life: its banalities, its predictable crises, its blind and sometimes seeing and saving faith, the deep and uncanny knowledge that grows up between a man and a woman after years of the work of living together. To this subject Dubus brings a relentless, meticulous tough-mindedness: he never shirks from facing even the most excruciating emotional truths. He is the Hemingway of the marital safari.

Dubus is not an intellectual writer. His characters are rarely able to escape into abstraction: they exist enviably, at times irritatingly, in the here and now. When they are in love, they’re really in love; when they hate, they hate. Like Raymond Carver, Dubus — especially in his earlier stories — creates a kind of Country and Western universe in which characters who live first and think second drink, covet, commit adultery, and break, often beyond repair. And like Carver, many of his stories of marriages on the rocks can be almost too painful to read, in such minute detail do they recount the shape of the boulders, the spray, the screams of the happy pair as they go under.

What makes the stories bearable, however — and what elevates them above Carver’s sparer, more dramatic and emotionally jagged tales — is an articulated moral vision. Dubus brings a singular compassion to even the most unsympathetic characters and sordid situations. Throughout his work sounds the heartbeat of conscience, at once an engine and a call to spiritual arms.

The downside of sincerity, of course, is bathos. And at times Dubus’ compassion, combined with his unfailingly earnest sensibility, verges on sentimentality. But he is usually too honest to take feel-good conclusions off the shelf unless his characters have paid for them. So powerfully does Dubus communicate anguish in his stories that even when the conclusions ring false, the impression left is one of a larger, extra-literary truth. For example, in the title story of an earlier collection, “Voices From the Moon” (which, like much of his work, is more of a novella, in both its length and its undramatic sensibility, than a short story), Dubus tells the story of a father who falls in love with and marries his son’s ex-wife. Writing with remarkable empathy from the perspectives of all the members of the family, Dubus arrives at, and brings his characters to, a kind of painful peace. If the older son’s mellowing is not entirely convincing, so powerful is the tale’s moral purpose, and so deeply felt the things that stand in its way, that one is inclined to forgive.

In so many other stories, however — “Adultery,” in which an unhappily married woman is spurred by her lover’s terminal cancer to divorce her husband; “Miranda Over the Valley,” in which an abortion urged by well-meaning parents shatters a young girl’s love; “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” in which a marriage’s dissolution is sketched in wise, lurid, weary strokes, to name just three — Dubus unites a majestic moral sensibility with a clear-eyed awareness of the things that fall outside the realm of moral judgment. He observes, without judging, the ways that people haphazardly kill the things most important to them, the ways that fate and deceit and forgetfulness doom the highest hopes. For Dubus, the pact between man and woman is where those hopes are born and where they, sometimes, die. He is not interested in much else.

One of the things he is&nbspinterested in is resistance, fighting, coming back: from injury, from danger, from lust, from ennui, from the despair that is a sin against the spirit. (It is, perhaps, Dubus’ muscular Catholicism that keeps his writing green, almost boyish.) And in “Dancing After Hours,” his first collection of fiction since a devastating 1986 traffic accident that cost him his leg, Dubus writes of people, especially women (about whom Dubus has always written superbly), who are tested. The stories are not quite linked (although one character, Luanne Arceneaux, appears in several of them), but they do add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts, the mournful fatalism of one story balancing the redemptive optimism of another. It is not a flawless collection, but like all of Dubus’ work, it resonates in the mind after it is read, like an instrument made of good wood. And two of the stories are quite beautiful.

The least successful stories in the collection are two Hemingway-ish tales about physical survival. In one, a woman remembers how her family fought off sharks when their fishing boat sank. (Dubus describes how the father, without hesitating, jumped back into the water to try to save the mortally wounded captain — an episode that recalls, without self-deprecation or self-aggrandizement, Dubus’ own unreflecting heroism in saving a stranger’s life during the accident that disabled him.) In another, a woman beats up two prowlers who threaten to rape her. Both stories are gripping, but neither offers much besides powerfully-rendered action.

More compelling are the stories dealing with the attempts of the lonely and lost to find redemption. The long title story, about a lonely waitress who finds the courage to live again after watching a crippled man and his attendant through a long evening, is a melancholy study of the slow rising of hope. Shadowing this story, its emotional opposite, are several tales of hope thwarted, notably “Falling in Love,” a half-despairing tale about the unhappy love affair between a woman and Ted Briggs, a “strong man with sad eyes and a bad knee and a history she could feel in his kiss.”

The stories in “Dancing After Hours” constitute an ongoing dialogue about love, and at times Dubus’ moral commentary can be a little too explicit. In “The Timing of Sin,” for example, a happily-married woman almost commits adultery, but pulls back when she has difficulty getting her pants off — her zipper lending a helping hand to her conscience. It’s a good story, but her self-analysis at the end of it grates. After saying that it was God who saved her (“you can’t be saved by jeans”), she rejects her friend’s suggestion that it was her virtue that pulled her through. “What I was being was hot. If I take all the credit for getting out of it, I have to take all the blame for getting into it, too. That’s too simple, and too unbearable. My job is to try, and to be vigilant, and to keep hoping.” Here sincerity has become a didactic recitation of Camus-lite platitudes.

In the collection’s two best stories, however, Dubus achieves something new and powerful. In “The Lover” he writes about despair with extraordinary power: there is an emotional finality here, a daringly uncharactistic “literariness” that captures the truth of his character’s predicament more acutely than his wonted realism. And in “At Night,” Dubus’ prose soars to new heights.

“The Lover” is about a stoic, searching middle-aged man named Lee, who is on the sidelines of love after three marriages. Looking back on his first marriage, Lee feels only an ancient bafflement: “The marriage ended much later, when their sexual mischief was far behind them, and Lee would never understand all of its ending any more than he could explain why, on their first date in college, there was already enough love between them to engender the years it would take to have three children and let their love die. He learned how quickly love dies when you weren’t looking; if you weren’t looking.”

Lee likes to go on long walks, “whose purpose was for at least one hour of light to see where he lived, smell it, touch it, listen to its sounds.” He has admired a woman named Doreen, but never dared to approach her. In the scene when they connect, Dubus abandons his reasonable-man model of dialogue and emotional comportment for a heightened, almost symbolic style. Ordinarily, a Dubus character would greet a woman sitting in a coffee shop with something like “How’s the station wagon?” Lee’s first words are “I woke to the sound of rain. It was the first thing I smelled.” This is at once wince-producing and close to some wonderful edge. A few moments later, the characters are in bed; after they make love Lee falls apart, crying out his life’s anguish in a wild, shoot-the-moon monologue: “Somewhere I missed something. Something my cock can’t feel. Even my heart can’t feel.” His rhetoric is stilted (“We were in bed, and there were all those fins”), but somehow it doesn’t matter. What matters is the revelation of this strong and decent man’s emotional emptiness — an emptiness that creeps up on the reader.

“At Night” is the shortest story in the book, and the most perfect. Beginning with the words “She always knew she would be a widow,” it consists of four paragraphs about an old woman and her husband. This is the final paragraph:
“But on the summer night when he died while she slept, probably while he slept, too, she woke in the cool dark, the windows open and a pale light in the sky, and the birds singing, and she knew before she turned to him, and she did not think of her children, or of being alone. She rolled toward him and touched his face, and her love went out of her, into his cooling skin, and she wept for what it had done to him, crept up and taken him while he slept and dreamed. Maybe it came out of a dream and the dream became it. Wept, lying on her side, with her hand on his cheek, because he had been alone with it, surprised, maybe confused now as he wandered while the birds sang, seeing the birds, seeing her lying beside his flesh, touching his cheek, saying: “Oh hon — “

By remaining within his little circle of light, in the place he knows, Dubus has made a world in which nothing human is alien, a world where the last whispered words of a wife stand against the darkness, transfiguring it. And in this story that speaks of endurance and change, his words too are transfigured: The long habit of kindness has worn away their rough edges until they are as smooth and beautiful as an old rock on a beach.

It is a vision that would have terrified Hieronymus Bosch: A roomful of Young Beltway Conservatives in heat, doing the frug and other wild, proto-punk dances with crazed abandon, while forbidden thoughts of immoral, value-destroying premarital sex stir deep within and those relentless, hypnotic, jungle rhythms drive them closer…closer…closer to a burning, explosive, proto-punk climax — “END THE WELFARE STATE!!!”

Podhoretz’s horrifying reminiscence recalls a peculiar beer ad that ran during the Bush administration. In an attempt to prove the dubious and frightening thesis that “The night belongs to Michelob,” Anheuser-Busch presented a triumphantly gyrating yuppie, power tie loosened, wailing some heavy rock guitar in a bar.

“Backward and Upward” tries to do for conservatives what the Michelob ad attempted for beer-quaffing young stockbrokers: make them hip.

It doesn’t work.

American conservatives are doomed to suffer in squaredom for a simple reason (besides weak hair): their stance of Permanent Moral Disapproval. Whatever virtues this state may possess, hipness is not one of them. Fred MacMurray may be an admirable paterfamilias and a model of bourgeois rectitude, but he will not win the dance contest on Soul Train.

The Right has a serious fun problem. Like evil runes possessed of a curious power, the words carved on the id of every teenager worth her salt — sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll — send conservatives into a howling, medieval fury. The inconvenient fact is that all hipness contains a spice of nihilism, a tiny but flavorful soupcon of who-gives-a-shit, that is anathema to the Right. To the degree that conservative writers embrace Cool Style, they simply cease to be conservative.

Well aware of the Right’s venerable dorkiness, editor David Brooks (a senior editor at conservative strategist William Kristol’s The Standard), tries to stick some blue suede shoes on its moist, deodorized feet. It is instructive that he opens his introduction by referring to a 1995 New York Times Magazine cover story about the new right-wingers whose not-so-subtle point was: Hey, they’re YOUNG! (Just as Susan Sontag’s beauteous book-jacket photo is probably the only thing most readers remember about “Against Interpretation,” so the image of one young female reactionary — I think it was former Quayle speechwriter Lisa Schiffren — in a tigerskin top was pretty much the entire justification for the Times’ forgettable piece. Right-wing blondes in tigerskin have an Ayn Rand-ian, whip-me appeal that transcends partisan allegiances.)

For the under-40 conservatives flooding into the Beltway in the wake of the Republicans’ ’94 congressional landslide, the Times Magazine story must have seemed like a harbinger of way-coolio times ahead. Here they were, the former killjoys, the ideologues, the perversions of nature, finally getting to bust a dope move on the big cultural stage. (The fact that this book is published by Vintage, not the usual Right organ Free Press, is another measure of the conservative’s supposed new cultural sexiness.) According to Brooks, the result has been “a new conservative personality that is urbane, self-assured (rather than defensive), cosmopolitan, and diverse in race and gender.”

Part of this new urbanity, Brooks says, is an openness to fun. One of the book’s six sections, in fact, is titled “Pleasures”; it contains celebrations of such bipartisan amusements as romantic love, Cole Porter, and Dorothy Parker, as well as the slightly gamier pleasures of TV violence, multiple-car ownership, and — yoicks! — “hunting to hounds.” There are repeated denunciations of the supposed liberal bias against smoking. And one writer finds the image of a man settling down with “his hound and his jug” so wonderful, he uses it in each of his two pieces.

While conservatives are having all this vigorous fun smoking up a storm, pushing the speed limit, watching Chuck Norris and rinsing their Rottweilers with Old Grand-Dad, liberals are worrying about whether their lo-fat ice cream will save the rain forest. The Left, says Brooks, has authored a “new form of social puritanism…Everything in liberalism gets wrapped up in a prissy etiquette.”

In other words, we had it all backwards: The Right, far from being the uptight faction, is the party-down party — the Left is may-I-touch-your-breast-world.

It is not an argument that is immediately convincing, and closer inspection does not improve it. Brooks’ equation of liberalism with PC is crude — PC is primarily a disease of academia, and while the Left has much etiquette-mongering to live down, smarminess isn’t innate to it. And in his desire to present a cooler, sexier Right, Brooks shoves the distasteful Torquemada wing of the party under the bed — where, no doubt, it sets about monitoring the proceedings.

The dirty secret of modern American conservatism, one which goes all the way back to the bitter ’50s disputes between Russell Kirk and Frank S. Meyer, among many others, is that it is not in fact one ideology, but two fundamentally irreconcileable ones: classic economic liberalism on one side, and Christian traditionalism on the other. As George H. Nash points out in his fascinating study “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945″ (Basic, 1976), a shared anti-Communism and the exigencies of political ambition allowed the libertarian, free-market followers of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to paper over their differences with the “values” conservatives like Kirk and Richard Weaver (who thought the West went off the tracks in the 14th century) — traditionalists who held no brief for big business or festishized capitalism. But despite the best efforts of William F. Buckley and Meyer, who championed a so-called “fusionism” of the two positions, no final reconciliation was, or is, possible. It’s hardly surprising that Brooks plays up the Right’s less strident libertarian face and downplays its appeals to resentment and its tendency to authoritarianism and theocracy.

Still, even if mainstream conservatism is more censorious than Brooks wants to admit, the very fact that he and others on the Right are proclaiming the virtues of irreverence might seem encouraging — if one didn’t suspect that it was just another partisan strategy to exploit the perceived “moralism” of liberalism. Some of the essays in “Backward and Upward” do indeed demonstrate a commendable open-mindedness: Richard Brookhiser, in his piece on Cole Porter, deals directly and respectfully with Porter’s homosexuality and even writes, heretically, that “couples and families can lead lives as coldly empty as those of promiscuous narcissists.”

But such willingness to challenge received conservative pieties is rare. More often, these pieces simply reflect no political perspective whatsoever. Of the 41 essays and articles reprinted here, about half are completely non-ideological, chosen, it would seem, because their authors hold right-wing political views. Thus, there are articles on the pleasures of life in Washington, on a scandalous child-abuse case, on spaying a dog. Brooks clearly intends these pieces to demonstrate the new breadth of conservative thinking — but all they demonstrate is that right-wingers, like left-wingers, centrists, Trotskyites and followers of Idi Amin, can write mediocre pieces on a wide variety of issues.

For, unfortunately, a lot of the work here is mediocre — or downright awful. There’s some good stuff — a fine essay by classicist Donald Kagan knocking the stuffing out of George Will’s “Men at Work,” Kay Hymnowitz’s intelligent analysis of how we have demystified love to our peril, Clifford Orwin’s stirring tribute to Allan Bloom, Florence King’s critique of the Left’s de-clawing of Dorothy Parker — but overall this is a remarkably tepid collection, devoid of literary elan. Even the stars don’t shine: Christopher Buckley can be a howlingly funny writer, but his essay here, on how truly tough guys don’t posture (he should tell it to some of his hairy-chested mates on the Right), is no more than competent. Philosopher Roger Scruton, another big gun, doesn’t do much except egregiously stick his fox-hunting hobby in the Left’s sure-to-be outraged ear.

One would like to believe that the breezy, sophisticated, multicultural new Tory proclaimed by Brooks does exist — the stagnation of American intellectual life cries out for fresh approaches. But if the mark of intellectual self-assurance is a willingness to question one’s own beliefs and values — not to mention those of one’s political party, a feat which requires considerably less mental integrity — there is little evidence here that political success has bred anything more than partisan complacency in the Right.(This isn’t actually surprising: conservative writers, by definition, already know the answer&nbsp– which is why their prose so often exudes an airless smugness.) With a few exceptions, those dozen or so pieces in “The New Conservative Writing” that address central issues of conservative ideology — welfare, the role of government, patriotism, self-defense, the nature of liberalism — betray the same old doctrinaire, resentful, I’ve-got-mine-Jack dogmas familiar to readers of National Review.

Take the bombastic-frat-boy rantings of Rolling Stone correspondent P.J. O’Rourke, captured here in embarrassingly sectarian Libertarian Toastmaster mode as he leads the faithful of the Cato Institute in a fatuous attack on the very idea of government, stopping to lustily excoriate that Satan of “liberalism,” Bill Clinton. (The frequent demonization of Clinton, perhaps the most centrist President since Eisenhower, in this collection reveals the humiliation that can befall a putatively intellectual movement when its “thinkers” are speechwriters, columnists, radio bullies, and party hacks.) At his best, O’Rourke is one witty reactionary, but he comes off here like a second-rate attack comedian working a room of drunks. (My favorite line: “We believe in God. Clinton believes in going to church.” The Ayatollah K., almost as adept as O’Rourke at using “God” as a club to bludgeon the unrighteous, couldn’t have put it better.)

Or take the challenging but ultimately mean-spirited speech by novelist Mark Helprin to a West Point class, in which he confesses to his own guilt over not fighting in Vietnam — then denounces all those others who refused to serve. By Helprin’s logic, no citizen of any state could ever follow his own conscience and refuse to fight. (Strange — all the other conservatives say the state is too coercive.) In this showdown between Thoreau and Helprin, Helprin does not emerge victorious.

To judge by this singularly weak collection, contemporary conservatism is far more intellectually exhausted and threadbare, has less to say to Americans confronting a rapidly-changing world, than its supposedly out-of-gas liberal counterpart. (This year’s pathetic crop of Republican presidential candidates, with the exception of the gravely flawed populist Buchanan, have done little to dispel this impression.) At least the intellectual Left, led by writers like Michael Lind, Robert Hughes, Stanley Crouch, Russell Jacoby and Todd Gitlin, has subjected its own pieties to withering self-criticism. More important, it has acknowledged the increasing irrelevance of the terms “Left” and “Right” in an age when the power lies not with Big Federal Government but with Big Corporate Government — and begun working on new theories that are less driven by ideology than reality.

For its part, the Right, instead of trying to understand why its faithful are turning to Pat Buchanan, the one candidate who addresses such bread-and-butter issues, desperately recycles pie-in-the-sky supply-side economic theories and even more abstract trickle-down cultural theories (introduce “risk” back into society, they intone, with all the social-engineering zest of lab-coated ideologues who face very little risk themselves). With their obsessive, infantile prating against “government” (a position utterly without intellectual coherence, unless you accept the daunting ideology of anarchism), conservatives are hopelessly incapable of grappling with the real issues that are plaguing America — downsizing, the structural job loss caused by technology, the decline in real wages, the widening gap between rich and poor.

In one of the few pieces in this collection to even mention the issue of corporate power (why is it OK for these freedom-loving souls to be ruled by a corporation but not a government agency?), Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley points out that in the coming world, “the real economic competition will not be between nations but between companies.” But Bartley has nothing to say about how those companies will relate to their workers or to their nations.

Instead of addressing those issues, or the inconvenient question of the relation between a late-capitalist commodity economy and the erosion of “traditional values,” the conservatives find it more worthwhile to beat up on that enormous threat to American society, the men’s movement. Bongos, the last redoubt of liberalism, must be ruthlessly exposed for the cosmic menace that they are.

“Bad writing is now on the Left, with all the other sloppiness,” writes Florence King. Based on the evidence here, wretched prose is an equal opportunity employer.

What gives Sanders’ persona its enduring charm? Part of the answer lies in its strangeness: a Sanders
character is an emissary from a world that no longer exists. Just as there are no longer any circumstances in which one can imagine saying, with the chorus of puffing 19th century husbands, “Sir, your insolence is intolerable!” so the lamentable fact is that there are no longer any cads. Our
diminished modern keyboard of sexual villainy no longer possesses that peculiar note. Assholes, losers, creeps, yes. Bozos, jerk-offs, schmucks and idiots, to be sure. Men with “issues,” co-dependents, sex addicts and those “unable to commit” — these can be found on every bar stool. But cads? They have gone the way of dueling scars, vapours and the monocle — an ocular accessory, not coincidentally, much favored by our hero.

To be sure, if one defines a cad simply as a man who trifles with the affections of what inexplicably used to be called “the sex,” he is indistinguishable from a garden-variety asshole. And perhaps, at bottom, there is little ethical difference between the two. This makes Sanders’ feat all the more impressive: virtually single-handed, he sublimated the scoundrel, transformed the bounder into a work of art. “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing,” said Oscar Wilde’s Gwendolyn, a phrase one can almost hear emerging from Sanders’ slightly-curled lips; and indeed, in the course of a long career in which he played every variety of sexual adventurer, he gave such glorious style to his characters that one would rather burn in hell with them than sit in heaven with the good, the true and the maritally dutiful.

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 particularly 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 protigi 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
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 beyond my control,” he wrote. “The blunt truth is that I invariably play myself.”

Despite his own droll professions of caddishness, however, the real George Sanders — although unquestionably a ladies’ man — seems not to have been a cad at all. The portrait that emerges from his memoirs, and from Richard VanDerBeet’s biography, “George Sanders: An Exhausted Life” (Madison, 1990), is of a shy, complex, obscurely troubled, imperfect but basically decent man (he was heartbroken when his beloved wife Benita died of cancer) who hid from the world behind a cynical mask. “I know, in my own case, that the kind of actor I have become has been determined to a large extent by the weakness of my character,” Sanders wrote. “On the screen I am usually suave and cynical, cruel to women and immune to their slights and caprices. This is my mask, and it has served me faithfully for 25 years. But in reality I am a sentimentalist, especially about myself — readily moved to tears by cheap emotions and invariably the victim of woman’s inhumanity to man.”

It is this softness, this sense of romantic idealism behind the disdainful front, that lends pathos to those roles in which Sanders was allowed to move beyond the mechanical definition of the cad. Even in his most misogynistic role, as a thinly veiled Gauguin in Albert Lewin’s finely intelligent “The Moon and Sixpence” (1942), he reveals great depths of hidden tenderness; it is a marvelous portrait of a Nietzschean amoralist who discovers, late in his life, that he has a heart. In “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947), not by any means a great film but a strange and strangely melancholy one, a lonely widow (Gene Tierney) is seduced by the outrageously flirtatious Sanders, plans to marry him — and then discovers he is married, has children, and has done this kind of thing before.

In their last scene together, before Tierney discovers the truth, she tells him happily that they have all the time in the world. If Sanders had played the scene as a straight, villainous cad, he would have carried smoothly on with his lovemaking. But an expression of utter anguish shoots for an instant across his face, and we realize that he actually loves Tierney, desperately, and knows there is no way out for him. His ugly behavior is revealed to be tragic, as if moonlight had suddenly illuminated a blasted landscape.

One of Sanders’ finest achievements, his portrayal of Charles II in the uneven Restoration drama “Forever Amber” (Otto Preminger, 1947), captures the essence of a man utterly disillusioned with life who still possesses the integrity to acknowledge his own emptiness. The ambitious Amber (Linda Darnell) has become the king’s mistress, but she makes the mistake of making it too clear to him that she loves another. In a devastating speech before he sends Amber away forever, Sanders says, “If I hadn’t been king, I might have managed sometime in my life to fall in love myself. But instead I’ve had to create an illusion of happiness. I’ve had to pretend to love, pretend to be loved. At best it was a fragile device, too easily shattered. And you’ve shattered it.” It is a devastating speech, delivered with enormous skill by an actor who has touched something deep in the human character.

On April 23, 1972, George Sanders checked into a hotel near Barcelona. He was in poor health, lonely, bewildered, without a home: a woman he had taken up with in his last years had convinced him to sell his beloved house in Majorca. Two days later, his body was discovered next to five empty tubes of Nembutal. A note read, “Dear World. I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”

The man who had made a career out of his mask, whose impeccable wit, unflappable demeanor and elegant force of life had brought joy to those who could appreciate pure, cold style, had died alone, in confusion and grief. But — as one last gift, or perhaps one last ironic bon mot — he had died in character, a wisecrack on his lips, professing boredom to the end. Of the thousand varieties of courage that exist in the world, perhaps this, too, is one.

In the meantime, in a penthouse somewhere in the sky, a lady is settling back on a luxurious divan in a sunken ’40s living room. The hidden orchestra is playing, the moon is turned up to 10 on the heartbreak scale, and suddenly a man glides through the open 52nd-story window, dressed to kill, insinuation written all over his face. Love trouble is his business and it’s useless to resist. He’s three steps ahead of her, he’s got the skyline on a dimmer switch, his voice is a three-martini buzz in the blood and the feeling of silk sheets and summer rain. He’s James Bond quoting Byron, Don Juan with the original etchings, Jeeves with a hard-on. He’s The Cad With the Broken Heart, he’s the face half-glimpsed behind the mask, he’s George Sanders, and he wants to be with her, tonight …

The ultimate retribution obsesses us because it exists beyond the small circle of light cast by everyday morality. There are no signposts in this realm — or, if there are, they cancel each other out. “An eye for an eye”? “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

The instinct to kill the killer of one’s child is as clean as the lion’s instinct to hunt — yet if we live under the rules of civilization on Monday, shall we suspend those rules when the unthinkable happens on Tuesday? We are taught that human life is sacred: under what conditions, if any, should it cease to be regarded as such? What place does the jungle have in our moral mathematics?

Two new films, Tim Robbins’ “Dead Man Walking” and John Schlesinger’s “An Eye for an Eye,” explore this issue from different directions. Neither film will probably change the minds of those who are certain that they possess the truth. What they reveal — one through its artistic success, one through its failure — is that such moral certainty does not, and should not, come easily. In these days in which every two-bit politician sets himself up as an apostle of virtue, this is a useful lesson.

John Schlesinger’s “An Eye for an Eye” is too slight and flawed a film to bear much discussion. Trying to make hay off the O.J. Simpson debacle, it offers a stale variant on the venerable what-to-do-when-the-law-fails plot. The twist here is that the aggrieved party (her daughter’s killer gets off on a ludicrous technicality involving, of course, DNA testing) is a yuppie housewife. Even this formulaic story line could have been potentially interesting, but Schlesinger makes things much too easy for himself. By presenting the killer as a monster whose extinction is obviously justified (after being freed, he kills again and threatens the mother’s surviving daughter), the director avoids having to deal with more profound issues — pathological obsession, the moral questions of taking the law into one’s own hands. Schlesinger’s vision is about as deep as a New York Daily News headline: his wish-fulfilling tale appeals to our shallowest O.J.-irritated emotions, and so says nothing.

By contrast, “Dead Man Walking,” Tim Robbins’ remarkable film about convicted murderer Matthew Poncelet and the nun who comes into his life as it nears its state-sanctioned end, possesses that rarest of qualities: moral humility. Robbins, like Sister Helen Prejean, on whose autobiographical book the film is based, clearly opposes the death penalty, but there is a curious, and moving, agnostic quality to his opposition. There are no grand, Clarence Darrow-like perorations about how the state has no right to play God. Ideology, intellectual abstractions, arguments for or against the death penalty, matter less here than a profoundly communicated sense of something ordinary, indefinable, and of inestimable value — life itself, even though it is the life of a miserable, hate-filled man who has destroyed two families.

The images that linger in the mind are ephemeral, banal: Poncelet’s little brother pacing back and forth in the visiting room at the family’s last visit, making his shoes squeak as bored young children do, as his mother and his brothers sit in a now-what-do-we-say silence that speaks of great and ordinary love. The tough mask of Poncelet’s face, in perhaps the most revelatory moment of a performance of great pathos by Sean Penn, cracking just for an instant as his mother breaks down. Sister Prejean, lying dazed on a bed, saying in confusion, “Oh, it’s so bizarre, a man’s going to be killed tomorrow in front of me.” It is her confusion, not her conviction, that touches the heart, just as it is Robbins’ moral uncertainty that gives his film its moral credibility.

Throughout, Robbins refuses to load the dice. He refuses to portray the grieving, bitter parents of the victims as caricatures: their desire for revenge, or closure, is never cheapened. He scrupulously balances the scene in which Poncelet is executed with horrifying flashbacks to the murder: we are never allowed to forget what Poncelet did. Film, with its unrivalled capacity to keep the past ghoulishly alive, is a superb instrument for moral exploration: like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “A Short Film About Killing,” which portrays a murder and an execution with the same cold-blooded detachment, “Dead Man Walking” is a kind of ethical laboratory. Those who oppose capital punishment are forced to watch the crimes, while those who support it are forced to look into the killer’s soul.

Indeed, more than anything else, this is a film about watching. Its central image is the open, courageous, pained face of Sister Prejean (played wonderfully by Susan Sarandon), whose vocation has placed her outside the world — and given her the moral courage to face it unflinchingly.

“I think killing’s wrong, whether I do it or the state does it,” Poncelet says as, the fatal IV in his arm, he is tilted upright on a gurney so that he may speak his last words to the observers. In one sense, this is clearly the film’s moral; but it is not its only, or perhaps even its ultimate, one. For in the end, this is a story about redemption — a secularized version of Christ’s passion. In its piercing spiritual simplicity, “Dead Man Walking” recalls Dickens, the great artist of spiritual regeneration (who would probably be regarded by some of today’s self-assured moralists as the original bleeding heart).

Yet Robbins avoids playing the sentimental card. The issue of whether or not the state has the right to kill Poncelet remains separate from the issue of his salvation: it is left to the viewer to decide whether the two things should be connected. And this reticence speaks most powerfully of all. In this realm, those who are certain they have the answer are revealed to be those who are lost in darkness.