Andre de Toth was one of the last of his kind — a journeyman but also an artist. He was a terrific director, but a severely underrated one, and he remains so to this day. He was also a brilliant raconteur and a fine friend, and I will miss him.

His movies are uniquely tough, unrelenting, unsparing, adult in the best sense. And he had a sense of humor that was absolutely pitch black. One of my favorite films of his is Play Dirty, in which the characters have absolutely no redeeming social values. They're just trying to get a difficult job done, and they do it. In the end, the heroes, if you can call them that, are killed by their own countrymen because they're dressed in the uniforms of the enemy. That was Andre's kind of irony — life holds no guarantees.

Andre had one good eye, of course, and he certainly made the most of it. There's a visual clarity in his best movies, like Ramrod, another favorite, or Day of the Outlaw, or Pitfall or Monkey on My Back, that I often find myself studying, and marveling over. And then there's House of Wax, which has the most beautiful and complete 3-D effects ever devised — once again, by a man with only one good eye. I also have a special fondness for that one because it takes place on Mulberry Street, in my old neighborhood.

I would urge all of you to go home and watch some of Andre's movies. We all still have a lot to learn from him. Remembering the man himself is not too tough — for anyone who ever had the pleasure of meeting him, he's impossible to forget.