by Diane Cilento
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Diane Cilento, author of three books, was a far more prolific actor, appearing in a few dozen films, including Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), as Hannah Reitsch, a promising young surgeon in Hitler’s bunker, alongside…
…yep, Delbert Grady himself, Philip Stone, who played the dubious General Jodl.
The Manipulator (the cover of which looks like it might’ve been inspired by Lolita) is considered a little on the trashy side by some, and certainly the book sounds like a bit of loosely autobiographical pulp fiction. It sounds like a way for her to lash out at a lot of the types of artists she met in her field, which is fairly ballsy.
In the eyes of some Cilento was most famous for being Sean Connery’s wife (to whom the novel is possibly dedicated (“For Sean”), and whom she divorced the same year as the Hitler picture), which has a somewhat obscure connection to the fact that Barry Nelson (Ullman) was the first person to ever play an on-screen James Bond. Wendy will seem to fawn over Ullman during the entirety of their relationship, and in the deleted final scene of the movie, he’ll insist Wendy and Danny come live with him in his Los Angeles estate, to Wendy’s traumatized leeriness. Or, that’s what I’m imagining happens, since Ullman leaves the room before she can accept or decline his offer.
I don’t know if Kubrick saw a through-line between Seidel and Cilento, beyond these superficial connections, but perhaps the titular “manipulator” is meant as a symbol of the movie machine itself, and Kubrick was making a point about our cinematic experience of the Holocaust versus the real men and women who took the time and effort to make Hitler’s vision a reality.
Next literary reference: No End to the Way
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