His was of one of those European generations — there were several — that were blown through the world by the twin hurricanes of Nazism and Stalinism, those incredibly violent storms that shattered the continent's old social compact (already enfeebled by World War One), scattered most of its great artists and intellects to the several remaining corners of the world where they were allowed to create and think in relative freedom and taught everyone caught up in this whirlwind — even its tailors and shoemakers — never again to believe that fate was predictable, that life was ruled by anything other than blind chance. Anthony Side, the film historian, once made a partial list of the countries in which Andre had directed. These included, besides his native Hungary and the United States, Britain, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Libya, Austria, Italy, the former Yugoslavia and Morocco. His was not, to put it mildly, a settled life.

And that may have prevented him from being a "great" director, whatever that means. It takes distracting time and effort to keep adapting to new places, to reinvent yourself in ever-changing circumstances; Andre made, for example, six pictures in Hungary in the 1930s that are largely unknown outside that country, and were thus close to useless in establishing his credentials elsewhere. The balance of his work is certainly not widely known outside the most devoted cienphile/cineaste circles; too many of his pictures were made on low budgets, featuring stars whose names are too faded to carry a DVD release to success — or even get one a release. But even if his films were more generally available, I don't think they would be widely appreciated; his themes are too bleak, discomfiting, unsettling to viewers looking for an evening of nostalgic '40s or '50s entertainment. He is a man who belongs in the company of Sam Fuller and Budd Boetticher — men whose work is bleaker, darker, therefore more memorable — once you have sought it out — than that of more famous (and more genial) filmmakers.

Andrew Sarris wrote that Andre's "most interesting films reveal an understanding of the instability and treachery of human relationships... are unusually unpleasant explorations of failed love and trust." This is an excellent, brief summary of his work. And it directly derives, I've always believed, from the instability and untrustworthiness he observed, had visited upon him, once he was driven from the gemutlich Budapest he knew growing up.

What we are talking about here is, to put it simply, a man who saw fate as blind, cruel, entirely erratic in the ways it afflicted individual human destinies, yet a man whose best work always focused on the desperate strivings of individuals to avoid being overwhelmed by that force, to somehow reach an accomodation with it.

This was not always a happy accommodation. Take, for example, Alexander Knox's schoolteacher in Andre's first significant American movie, None Shall Escape. There is an obvious prescience about this picture, since it imagined, well before World War II was over, the war crimes trials that, indeed, followed it. But that's not its most interesting aspect. It tells the story of Alexander Knox's German schoolteacher working in Poland prior to the First World War. He is, in this incarnation, not a spectacularly bad man. Indeed, none of Andre's protagonists are strikingly good or bad; they are very ordinary people. We can, for example, imagine the Knox figure creating a modest, contented life in this village. But the war intervenes and he is wounded. Thereafter, he cannot find work or love in Weimar, Germany, drifts toward Nazism, then returns to Poland as cruel conqueror, wrecking vengeance on his former neighbors and friends. What we see here is a man incapable of resisting that aspect of Nazism that played to weaklings and opportunists. He is a pathetic, not a tragic figure, and following his life's course None Shall Escape becomes one of the few American wartime movies that went beyond the cliches with which jack-booted evil was usually portrayed on the screen, suggesting how monstrousness so readily tempted millions in their unheroic ordinariness.

In what may be Andre's best movie, Pitfall, another ordinary sort of fellow, Dick Powell's insurance company claims adjuster, risks his happy home (presided over by the lovely Jane Wyatt), as he is drawn into sexual temptation by Lizabeth Scott. Powell knows better; he is not without a certain cynical knowledge of the world — expressed in the crisp cynicism of his early passages with Wyatt. But the man is bored senseless, lost in dreams of the more romantic life he had once envisioned for himself. This makes him easy prey for Scott, who is far from being a noirish femme fatale. She's a nice, vulnerable, yearning young woman who has fallen for an embezzler, some of whose ill-gotten gains Powell is trying to recover from her. A two-night stand occurs. Which drives Raymond Burr's private detective, obsessed with Scott, crazy. The result, finally, is two murders which endanger the stability of Powell's marriage and family.

In short, he has tempted fate too radically. And we don't know, at the end of the film, if he and Wyatt can reconstitute their former trust, if they can survive together. Pitfall is a very unsettling little movie, much more so, I think, than Douglas Sirk's lusher, softer explorations of similar themes at around the same time. There is something much more provisional — tackier if you will — in Andre's vision of suburban certainty's uncertainties.

Fate — and the rebellion against it — plays an even darker role in Andre's other excellent Los Angeles noir movie, Crime Wave. In it Gene Nelson plays an ex-con trying to go straight, yet drawn through threats back to the criminal life by escaped jailhouse associates. Sterling Hayden is the ultra-tough cop who uncompromisingly personifies fate; he believes a rap sheet is a man's inescapable destiny. He relents (temporarily we're sure) from this bleak view of human nature, cuts Nelson a break, only at the very last moment of this taut and atmospheric movie.

So it goes in de Toth's world. Who is The Gunfighter (in the Academy-nominated story Andre wrote for that fine Western) but a man trying (and failing) to evade his reputation — his fate — as the West's fastest gun. Who is the Gary Cooper character in Springfield Rifle but a man trying to avoid his fate — dictated by the world's (mis)understanding of him as a coward — and prove himself to be someone else. Who is Robert Ryan in Day of the Outlaw but a man dourly, desperately, trying to redeem himself from one-dimensional definition as a man hopelessly, self-despisingly in love with the wrong woman.

That last is, literally, the winteriest movie I've ever seen, shot in the California high country with its protagonists often hip-deep in snow. Visually, it is a perfect metaphor for all of Andre's work — cold, claustrophobic, cheerless — so unlike the man himself. His is nowadays, at best, a half-remembered world. But it is one well worth seeking out in order to acquaint yourself with a minimalist master of some of American movies' harshest emotional terrain. In the era of the feel-good movie and the overblown movie, we've been missing Andre, who had not directed a movie since 1968, had been missed by some of us for a very long time before he passed away last October.