Soon after Lord Jim premiered in the United Kingdom on February 16, 1965, a day after its screening for a select audience that included Queen Elizabeth II and co-star James Mason's aging parents, who so disliked the film that they “left the theater during the break” and missed their son's entire performance, the verdict was in. Despite the London Daily Mail's enthusiastic claim that “LORD JIM has just about everything!”, the film was an extravagant failure, Richard Brooks's “brave but exhausting attempt,” as New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther put it, “to run with the subtle Conrad character and hunt with the gross big-picture hounds.” Calling the film “a debacle of such awesome dimensions that I shrink from the demands of detailed analysis,” Andrew Sarris concluded: “The most depressing aspect of all this is that Brooks had absolute freedom to do whatever he wanted, and demonstrated conclusively that he carried all the studio compromises inside him. Brooks wanted to film Conrad all his life, but when the chips were down, he simply couldn't believe that the mass audience could possibly understand Conrad without visual aids on the kindergarten level.”

The critics whose verdicts foretold the film's colossal financial failure agreed on two points. In attempting to make an action film that was also a psychological study of his neurotic, guilt-ridden hero's quest for redemption, Brooks had succeeded in doing neither, betraying the classic modernist novel Joseph Conrad had published in 1900. More fundamentally, the paramount aim of Brooks, a writer-director who had not made a film from an original screenplay since at least The Last Time I Saw Paris, loosely based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's story “Babylon Revisited,” in 1954, had been to adapt Conrad's novel, as he had had the audacity to adapt works as challenging as Something of Value, The Brothers Karamazov, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the intervening years.

It would surely be charitable to forgive Brooks on the grounds that Conrad's novel is unadaptable. And indeed many of Conrad's trademark narrative techniques make Lord Jim highly resistant to film adaptation.