Let's tackle your questions separately:

Film Camera

The short answer is 'no.' There is no marketed utility that I'm aware of which would give you complete control over a film camera (even a relatively modern one). Now I can imagine a it would be possible (and even potentially relatively easy) to put together a DIY solution as long as the camera is recent enough that it uses an electronically-based remote shutter solution, but that would be far from full control of the camera. Essentially you'd be able to kick the AF, trip the shutter, and perhaps program in intervalmeter functionality, but that'd be about it.

The main reason for this is that film-based cameras, even the most 'modern' models produced by companies such as Canon and Nikon up until a few years ago are still more 'mechanical' than 'electrical' in operation... and what is electrical was not designed or intended to communicate via a realtime 2-way persistent connection 'with the outside world' such as would be necessary for this level of control. All of the realtime communication that is possible with today's modern dSLR cameras wasn't even a consideration until dSLR cameras came along...

The EOS Link ES-E1 was not a utility which enabled anything resembling realtime control of the camera... It was designed to help the camera user adjust the custom functions of the camera, and it could export picture data (essentially a forerunner of EXIF data) from the camera. Again, nothing about the utility was realtime, and it certainly couldn't enable any sort of camera control. Additionally, the utility hasn't been updated for nearly a decade, and it was designed to run via Windows NT/Windows 98, or on a pre-OSX Mac, so you're likely to have quite a time getting it to run on anything resembling a modern OS, any way you cut it.

While I have no direct experience with Nikon's line of film cameras, I would be very surprised if the situation were different in the world of Nikon film cameras.

dSLR Camera

In a nutshell, it is possible to control every aspect of a Canon dSLR with the Canon EOS Utility that comes as part of the package with every Canon dSLR camera. Nikon provides a similar level of control for their dSLR cameras via their Camera Control Pro 2 software, but unlike the Canon utility which is free, Nikon charges around $150 for their utility. These utilities allow fine-grained control, and access to every aspect of the camera's operation, including the firing of the cameras in burst-mode.

The one thing that these utilities cannot do 'out of the box' is adjust settings automatically across a series of exposures without manual intervention, though I don't think it would be very difficult to script something to attend to this aspect of the tethered shoot if you were so inclined...