It’s hard to hear the term “white savior” in the cinema and not think of Peter O’Toole.

Any film which puts a caucasian in an embattled situation with a community of color as its problem-solver/hero invites the comparison, as O’Toole played a variation of this character more than once in his career — in “Lawrence of Arabia,” to a lesser degree in “Murphy’s War,” and most glaringly in the 1965 film adaptation of Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad’s treatise on cowardice, redemption and ego, “Lord Jim.”

It was a novel from the “white man’s burden” era of literature, the term coined by Conrad’s contemporary, the poet, novelist and short story writer Rudyard Kipling and perfectly applied to his story, adapted into film, “The Man Who Would be King.”

From its title to its conflicted, idealistic but “one of us” race-conscious “hero,” “Lord Jim” embodied this concept, that the “burden” of white men was to “civilize” and set an heroic, noble and infallible example to “the simple happy natives.”

Conrad learned English after moving to Britain, and experienced “Britishness” both as an outsider at the height of British Imperialism, and as a writer striving to be more English than the English. Many filmmakers held Conrad their highest literary esteem. David Lean (with Steven Spielberg) was struggling to film Conrad’s “Nostromo” when the “Lawrence of Arabia/Passage to India” director died. Orson Welles wanted his debut film to be an adaptation of “Heart of Darkness,” thirty years before Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius turned it into the Vietnam allegory, “Apocalypse Now.” Nicolas Roeg adapted that story for the screen as well.

Filmed partly in Cambodia as the Vietnam War was heating up, there are faint suggestions of a similar allegory in “Lord Jim,” with its French colonialist/warlord villain (Eli Wallach), amoral Western profiteers (Curd Jürgens, Akim Tamiroff, James Mason) and hero struggling to not merely consider the natives he is helping his equals, and with those of his own “kind” who cannot understand his seemingly misplaced racial loyalty.

Cambodia was about to be haplessly dragged into the Vietnam War, largely through the machinations of Henry Kissinger and the Nixon administration. But here, 1890s Cambodian natives are being enslaved in tin mines by Westerners, and need a white Western “savior” to lead them out of bondage.

Jim’s back-story explains his man-of the-sea “calling.” He stumbles into this late 19th century dilemma after a personal disgrace, a great test of courage he failed.

Jim was first officer on a rusting freighter stuffed with Muslim pilgrims crossing the Java Straight and Indian Ocean on haj to Mecca. And despite being “the sort of man” his mentor and our narrator Marlow (Jack Hawkins) says “you would trust on sight…one of us,” Jim was derelict in his duty. He let a tyrannical, heartless captain and cowardly shipmate (Jack MacGowran) convince him there was no hope of keeping the ship afloat in a storm, broke his word to the passengers and his professional code and fled with most of the other crew, leaving those helpless pilgrims in his care to their fates.

Jim accepts his shame and confesses. He faces loss of rank and employment and banishment from the world of white men of authority in the Far East, who see their “burden” made greater by Jim showing weakness to people they regard as their inferiors.

“If fear can find the flaw in even one of us, why not all of us?”

That’s what brings Jim to a remote Malayan port where his over-compensating heroics earn the attention and trust of a trader, Stein (Paul Lukas). That’s how Jim is sent upriver with gunpowder and rifles to try and give Cambodians the chance to resist a murderous warlord.

Jim’s heroics and toughness under torture impress the locals, and they help him escape to rally and organize them into a force to fight back. But Jim’s past and guilt weigh on him as he tries to live up to the man his new friends (Jûzô Itami, Tatsuo Saitô and Daliah Lavi) believe him to be, their “Lord” Jim.

Stein, who ponders Jim and wonders about his past until facts come to light about it, sizes him up for the viewer.

“You have too much pride in your humility.”

This cannot end well.

That summation speaks to the film, as well. Writer-director Richard Brooks won an Oscar for adapting “Elmer Gantry,” and is best remembered for his flinty, unsentimental and thoroughly chilling adaptation of “In Cold Blood.”

A gifted writer with an ear for novelists’ and playwrights’ florid dialogue (“Sweet Bird of Youth,” “The Professionals,” “Key Largo,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”) was almost bound to get caught up in the wave of mid-to-late-’60s “epics” which washed over most every studio and most every genre.

“Lawrence of Arabia” to “The Sound of Music,” “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World” to “El Cid,” “Cleopatra,” “The Great Escape,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “The Battle of Britain,” “How the West was Won,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and even “Casino Royale” were caught up in this big canvas/big-name cast, long-running time (often with intermissions) cinematic elephantiasis.

“Lord Jim” played, even then, like a poster child for the era’s excesses. Reviews were poor and the box office take middling.

Although Brooks briskly handles the montages that establish Jim’s background and reputation, he relies on too much literary voice-over narration by Marlow, a recurring character in Conrad’s fiction, to reinforce what the visuals make obvious.

The dialogue throughout is ornamental, poetic and excessive, when it’s not being screenwriterly cant.

“General, I salute you!”

But the biggest problem with “Lord Jim” remains its “bigness.” Whatever themes and racial politics it struggled to wrestle with, the blunt fact of what’s seen on the screen is that it’s a dark, Conradian redemption story/adventure that comes to a fine action climax, and then stumbles into the novel’s psychological coda, an over half-hour long anti-climax with action, comeuppance and Conrad’s last word on the character’s guilt, vanity and noble pose.

The Super-Panavision 70/Technicolor images are still stunning, the faked ship-in-a-storm sequence is impressive and the combat scenes visceral, violent and grimly satisfying.

O’Toole, fresh off “Lawrence of Arabia,” was the only actor of his era who could have given Jim his turmoil, guilt and fear of his own shortcomings. Wallach’s casting was entirely too “Magnificent Seven” on the nose. He’s just a French version of that Mexican villain, here.

But the other character actors employed are delicious to watch, from Jürgens at his “cowardly” best to Tamiroff adding another avaracious chancer to his long resume. Mason, as an overly erudite third act ruffian brought in to give the anti-climax a point, MacGowran’s sniveling fear-monger and Hawkins’ embodiment of “a sea officer’s duty” both score.

But while those cast as natives are playing characters with agency, there’s little here for them to say or play that underscores that. Conrad’s reputation as a being a British man-of-his-time in some of his attitudes, suggests this was a problem Brooks would need to confront. Casting and calling activist and fighter and “love interest” Daliah Lavi “the girl” and not giving others scenes to voice their hopes and humanity may have been in step with the era, but was a terrible choice.

Even “Magnificent Seven” did a better job of that, and John Sturges & Co. were working with seven “white saviors.”

Sturges, who had better luck with some epics (“Magnificent Seven,” “The Great Escape”) and poor luck with others (“Ice Station Zebra,” and he quit “Le Mans” mid-shoot), is another example of why not every filmmaker of the era was suited to these gigantic widescreen enterprises. Perhaps only David Lean could have made this work.

But even he would have needed a more coherent, more psychologically and emotionally resonant script than what Brooks conjured up.

And one suspects that this story’s racial attitudes, taken from Conrad and absorbed from Kipling, were never ever going to age well, no matter how pretty the images, how exciting the action and how perfectly-cast its “white savior” might have been.

Rating: TV-PG, violence, torture

Cast: Peter O’Toole, Eli Wallach, Daliah Lavi, Paul Lukas, Jûzô Itami, Tatsuo Saitô, Curd Jürgens, Akim Tamiroff, Jack MacGowran, Jack Hawkins and James Mason.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Richard Brooks, based on the novel by Joseph Conrad. A Columbia Pictures release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:34