Is it still Henry James time at the movies? Last I checked, the chubby turn of the century mannerist was still the champ of Proudly Presented cinema, with two prestige films - Washington Square and Wings of the Dove - playing to hyperborean, if not capacity, crowds. The movie house may be the last place left where the modernist revolution still matters, because only those books that pre-date Ulysses are considered worthy of enshrinement in the upper reaches of cinema (Merchant and Ivory did a turgid version of Kazuo Ishiguru's The Remains of the Day a few years back, but that's fudging things). Can we be far from the rediscovery of George Gissing, or yet another discovery of Anthony Trollope?

It's strange, though, that the hoity toity has to strain so visibly to make a literary movie, when the riffraff has been at it for years. But downmarket Hollywood, at its best, invokes its literary antecedents with a minimum of the sort of self-regarding fanfare that gave us the Liverpool Oratorio or any number of Rock Operas.

Does your appreciation for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre really increase with the realization that it's based on Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale? Who but your high school English teacher is going to be impressed by the discovery that the Godfather films, parts 1 and 2, are a retelling of the dynastic transition narrative in the Henriad?

These are the sort of antecedents we can enjoy without much mental taxation. Culture being largely a thing we experience in reverse, it's easier to deal with literature when we have a proper grounding in literature's proper place - the movies. How hard is it to appreciate Virgil's Aeneid, a rigorous tale of military wanderings, and the foundation of a warrior state? We saw the same thing in Stripes.

The possibilities are endless, once you know what to look for. Where can we find something as ingenious as Beowulf's dual mother and son villains? Look no further than Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th series. We read Dante and wonder where we've seen this architecture before - one adventure undeground, another at the surface and one in the sky. Of course - it's that subway-bus-elevator dynamic from Speed. The shaving Ourang-Outan in Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue is just a dry run for the vain, depilating Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs (In both book and movie, Bill is caught through Dupin-esque ratiocination). Consider MacBeth and Lady MacBeth: a childless couple with a shrewish wife and a husband whose efforts to rise above his station play out in futility against a backdrop of arcane lodge rituals. We've seen these two before - they're the Kramdens (There's even a Honeymooners episode in which Ralph is haunted to distraction - Banquo's Ghost-style - by the image of his fumbling pal Ed Norton).