It’s the time of year when there’s a lot of talk about films and catching up with films. Along with this, there has been talk about a new young Australian star, Jacob Elordi, who plays Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, and a young English toff in Saltburn. It’s hard to imagine that Coppola, who could make a film of genius like The Virgin Suicides from the Jeffrey Eugenides novel, wouldn’t put Elordi’s talent to significant use but we haven’t caught up with the film yet that started in cinemas on January 18.

You can, however, see Saltburn on Amazon Prime Video, and for all Elordi’s viability as a star, the film looks from the start very sub-Brideshead Revisited with a working-class boy from Liverpool (Barry Keoghan from The Banshees of Inisherin) taken by Elordi to meet his family and get the hefty sense of upper-class life via Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, and Carey Mulligan. It’s quite enough to make anyone give up on watching the film, but what transpires plot-wise is silly beyond belief and makes you feel the producers took leave of their senses.

All of which is enough to drive you to something a bit older and steadier. Well, things don’t come much older and steadier than Homer’s Iliad and we are all in the debt of the actor William Zappa who has prepared an abridged version of the great story of the fatal wrath of Achilles. Think of the moment when the warrior, who has avenged the death of his beloved Patroclus by killing Hector, the Trojan hero, is confronted by Priam, the Trojan king, who begs for his dead son’s body and says in Zappa’s translation that he has suffered, ‘what no man in the world should have to endure, that is to kiss the hands of the man who killed his most loved son’. Achilles – hard not to see with the face of the young Peter O’Toole – says, ‘But you were happy too in days gone by.’

It is one of the starkest scenes in the whole of literature and we are all in William Zappa’s debt for producing a viable abridgment of the Iliad because it is clearly from under its bloodstained cloak that the whole of Greek tragedy comes.

Helen Madden in Melbourne has had day-long public readings of Homer and back in 1986, Scripsi organised a reading of Christopher Logue’s dynamic paraphrases of the Iliad done by Logue himself and the Australian actor John Stanton. William Zappa has been doing his recital of his compact Iliad at festivals with the assistance of other actors like Socratis Otto, Blazey Best, and Heather Mitchell. His version is to be published later this year by Five Senses Publishing. It would be marvellous if, when he has finished his Iliad, he were to continue with the great Greek tragedies. Yeats translated Oedipus Rex and Tyrone Guthrie did a version of it in masks at Stratford Ontario with James Mason. But the Greek dramatic canon – notwithstanding the medium of translation – is a body of work comparable to Shakespeare. Seamus Heaney translated the late Sophocles’ tragedy Philoctetes, about the archer with the terrible affliction who alone can save the Greeks, as The Cure At Troy. Sir George Young, in his introduction to the early twentieth-century Everyman, said the play’s style was like late Shakespeare, ‘A terrible childbed hast thou had my dear / No light, no fire…’.

But the old Penguin translation of Sophocles by E.F. Watling is very presentable. ‘Many a man has dreamt as much,’ Jocasta says of Oedipus’s dread fears. And the great contemporary poet Anne Carson has translated everything from Sophocles’ Electra to The Bacchae of Euripides. Two great Australian actresses, Dame Judith Anderson and her successor, Zoe Caldwell, played Medea in Robinson Jeffers’ version, while Rose Byrne and her husband Bobby Cannavale used Simon Stone’s modern adaptation of Medea when they did it under his direction at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2020. Part of the challenge of tragedy – and this is equally true of the great Spanish plays like Calderon’s La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream) or Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna – is to capture an idiom reflective of a great cultural renaissance in modern language, a challenge that fascinates the Australian director Neil Armfield. Some people would say Louis MacNeice achieved it in his translation of Agamemnon, which kicks off Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, and high claims can be made for Ezra Pound’s version of The Women of Trachis.

Some extraordinary claims are made for Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours, the 1948 film about the classical conductor who thinks his wife is unfaithful to him which has Rex Harrison in one of his greatest performances and one you could argue was furthest from the high comic mode of his Henry Higgins or, much later, as Captain Shotover in that neo-Chekhovian Shaw play Heartbreak House. Quentin Tarantino thinks Unfaithfully Yours is one of the greatest films ever made. If you watch it and find it contrived you probably belong to the school that sees Sturges as the inventor of the American art movie and that the cinema which produced Orson Welles and John Ford, Billy Wilder, and Hitchcock didn’t need that.

How tricky these things are though. A recent glimpse of Terms of Endearment from a Larry McMurtry script with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson at the height of their powers had a richness and intensity of which no baby boomer who ignored it when it was released would have dreamt.

Then there was the great Bertrand Tavernier directing Tommy Lee Jones in James Lee Burke’s In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead. Both the director and the leading actor were staggering. Nor had the information that Tommy Lee Jones had studied English literature at Harvard and written a thesis about Flannery O’Connor and Catholic symbolism in her work stayed in the mind. But who would not kill to have seen Tommy Lee Jones in the original production of Sam Shepard’s True West? Such power, such latency, such darkness.

Incidentally – and not wishing to be a spoilsport – everyone’s raving about the Netflix version of Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe. The first episode follows the book but does it have the same ravishing power and colour?