Gerd Oswald is worth seeking out for his controlled thrillers and his attention to people who feel trapped. The feature work is uneven, but the precision of his framing gives us a reason to look beyond the familiar television credits.
Fi1m perspective
Oswald’s camera slides, turns and comes to a hard stop; his characters often face us as though there is nowhere else to look. We like the control, and the attention to people who do not fit comfortably into their surroundings. His feature debut, A Kiss Before Dying (1956), brings careful widescreen framing to a thriller about cold ambition. Crime of Passion (1957), with Barbara Stanwyck, gives him domestic boredom and female ambition to examine.
By the mid-1960s he was concentrating on television; his credits include fourteen episodes of The Outer Limits (1963). He made two episodes of The Fugitive (1963), a programme whose exhausted hero sits comfortably with his interest in outsiders. David Janssen gives us the strongest reason to follow its mixture of crime, action and melodrama. We felt for his hero because Janssen makes the repeated predicament look like something a person has to endure, rather than a handy way to keep a programme running. The narration presses too hard at times, but the performance makes patience worthwhile.
His two Star Trek (1966) episodes, The Conscience of the King and The Alternative Factor, belong to its first season. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley make its hopeful outlook persuasive by giving us characters whose disagreements are worth listening to. The moral lessons can be blunt, and the effects have dated, yet the three actors keep us interested in what happens between the lectures. It is a strong recommendation for the programme, though two episodes give Oswald only a limited claim on the qualities we admire across the series.
The feature work needs more selective viewing. Brainwashed (1960), his German adaptation of Stefan Zweig, is an ambitious undertaking weakened by conventional effects that sit awkwardly with the material. Start with A Kiss Before Dying before committing to a survey of the features.
Biography
Gerd Oswald (9 June 1919 – 22 May 1989) was a German film and television director. Born in Berlin, he was the son of director Richard Oswald and actress Käthe Oswald. He worked as a child actor before emigrating to the United States in 1938, where he began a long career as an assistant director.
Oswald directed the feature films A Kiss Before Dying (1956) and Brainwashed (1960). His extensive television credits include episodes of Perry Mason, Bonanza, The Outer Limits, The Fugitive (1963) and two episodes of Star Trek (1966). He also served as uncredited second-unit director on The Longest Day (1962).
Later credits include episodes of the 1985 revival of The Twilight Zone. Oswald died in Los Angeles.
