Whatever would Konrad Korzeniowski have thought? A man grows up in Poland. He sows his wild oats as an artist and imaginer in a romance with the sea. Then he settles in England, changes his name to Joseph Conrad and publishes great novels about life, death and moral apocalypse.

That is extraordinary enough. But then from across death’s divide there comes – to Conrad (assuming in heaven, as we surely can, the availability of movies) – something even more extraordinary. A man’s bald head is seen in a golden glow in the midst of darkness! The man sluices water over his pate! Another, younger man comes to him. There is ominous talk of atrocity and execution. Then comes the ceremony of butchering, followed by the dying words, “The horror, the horror”.

Would Conrad recognise himself in Apocalypse Now? If so, would he rejoice at Francis Coppola’s translation of Heart of Darkness to Vietnam? Or would he, in his bearded wisdom with those rueful eyes in that face carved from Easter Island rock, mutter “the horror” at what cinema has made of his imaginings?

Movies have been a second career for this writer. Alive he sailed the seven seas, dead he sails the seventh art. He puts in at a port here (Lord Jim), a coaling station there (Victory), an archipelago here and there (Outcast of the Islands). And there are one or two Ultimae Thules with the mist-girt grandeur of great cinema.

One of these is Apocalypse Now. Another is Sabotage, Hitchcock’s brilliantly inventive yet faithful-in-spirit adaptation of The Secret Agent. (That great novel is 100 this year and Conrad himself 150.) A third and fourth might have been – what might-have-beens! – Orson Welles’s Heart of Darkness, planned as his first movie before Citizen Kane, and David Lean’s late, long-planned film of Nostromo, scripted by Robert Bolt and Christopher Hampton. Lean died before it could be made.

These movies, even as skeletons that never took flesh (but got far enough to convey a tantalising promise), have a shiversome charisma and fascination.

What does Conrad have that other pen-wielders don’t? There have been many movies mined, God knows, from writers in English of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. James and Forster alone are mother lodes. But Conrad provides more than good plots, rich characters and mazes of moral complexity. He provides an engine of demonism. He provides something so strong, so diabolical, that you can change the details of his stories beyond recognition and they are still – in their core – Conradian.

As a story, Apocalypse Now has little in common with Heart of Darkness beyond a river journey and a tyrant called Kurtz. At the same time, it has all things in common. One is that narrating voice, deploying its “normality” as a defence against, or foil to, unnameable horror. Another is that journey into an alien interior that isn’t alien at all: it is our own minds, each of us a king in his own jungle. Coppola and his writers (John Milius, George Lucas) “got” all this. They also got that Heart of Darkness is a profane structure, a heathen template, that can be built on at will. It can be extended in all directions, narrative and metaphysical. This journey could go on forever and in Apocalypse Now Redux, Coppola’s expanded version of his original movie, it almost does.

Welles, playing alpha to Coppola’s omega, mapped out a treatment of Heart of Darkness in 1940, before RKO Pictures suspended it as too costly. The boy wonder who had done Conrad’s story before as a radio show (himself doubling Marlow and Kurtz) had a more faithful approach than Coppola. But even Welles’s script cannot resist amplifying Kurtz’s character so that this demagogue who disdains civilisation – who embraces his own godly barbarism – is given kinship with contemporary counterparts. The Hitler invocation is a little clunky – some parallels are better implied than loudhailed. But the Great Kurtz Acoustic, building on Welles’s fascination, delivered a marvellous éclat five years later when three Conrad devotees – Welles, Graham Greene and director Carol Reed – came together to create Harry Lime in The Third Man. Now there is a Kurtz for posterity. A monster in modern dress; a man going straight to hell but taking whomever he can, of the best, with him.

Conrad was, in a deep sense, a cinematic writer. He did not cross-cut between scenes but gave a graphic fluidity to his shaping of scenes. The Secret Agent makes up for confined geography with a rich choreography. It notates every gesture, movement, grimace. Hitchcock’s Sabotage, without duplicating Conrad, has an overpowering intensity of gesture and spatial awareness. A hand; a knife; a face; a bowed head; a raised eye; a clenched fist. Wittily and self-reflexively, Hitchcock also makes Verloc a cinema owner. He runs a London fleapit, his secret life as a terrorist and agent provocateur mirrored in the dreams he detonates daily for the huddled masses in the stalls. As Hitchcock knew, all art is dangerous, even potentially explosive, including “entertainment”.

Did Conrad invent terrorism? Among significant novelists only Dostoevsky got there before him. The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes are both in debt to The Devils. But where the complex, alienating structure of Under Western Eyes has resisted movie adaptation, The Secret Agent joins Lord Jim, Nostromo and Heart of Darkness among Conrad tales that fascinate filmmakers because they teach of the evil men do in the name of good. That’s a Dostoevsky theme but Conrad gave it a clinching everydayness.

Amazingly – or perhaps predictably – Lord Jim and Nostromo have never been successful on screen despite the spell they cast on filmmakers. Perhaps, in each work, there is too much. Writer-director Richard Brooks tackled Lord Jim soon after being out-wrestled by The Brothers Karamazov. His attention to the story’s outer action saps the power of the inner action. His Jim is Peter O’Toole, bleached-blond and burned-out, who had already done his definitive Conrad turn in Lawrence of Arabia. (Lawrence was a Conrad character – he happened to be a living one.) Lord Jim deserves a great film. But only Hollywood could afford it and no one in Hollywood, except Coppola who has already paid his Conrad dues, would dare to stare in the face of the novel’s cosmic, accumulating despair.

Nostromo has had two half-lives on screen, as a now forgotten silent film and as the David Lean epic that never was. Christopher Hampton remembers beginning his screenplay for Lean with Decoud’s drowned death, the story’s dooming treasure trailing to oblivion through the sea depths. I almost don’t want to hear any more. That captures the novel in a grain of artistry. What ever else – except the piling on of characters, subplots and probably guest stars – would Lean have done to make sense, even at three or four hours, of Conrad’s vast landscape of dream and folly?

Instead, as often with literature and the screen, it is the smaller novels and short stories, with their coiled-spring power, that create great cinema. Ridley Scott made his feature debut with The Duellists, Conrad’s yarn of feud and vengeance in the Napoleonic wars. The decades-spanning story is so strong in its muscular nihilism that not even eccentric casting (Methodish Yanks Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine mixed with theatre-trained Brits Robert Stephens and Albert Finney) can vitiate its power. Scott’s painterly panache helps. The film unfurls in glorious tableaux vivants, paintings stirred to life by themes and emotions. (Scott’s Conradophilia survived into Alien, whose spaceship is called Nostromo.)

Patrice Chéreau’s Gabrielle, adapting The Return, proves that Conrad can be Strindberg as well as Dostoevsky. Here the landscape is faces. But since they are those of Pascal Greggory and Isabelle Huppert, the tale of a wife who walks out on her husband and returns the same evening – to his astonishment, her crisis of embittered resolution and their conjugal ruin – the eyes have it. So do the blanched devastated complexions. So do the gestures, like those of unstrung mannequins twitching out their last nerve-movements in a tragedy of manners.

Conrad was not a cheerful chap. The cinema is obsessed with him rather as a prisoner is obsessed with his torturer. Every day brings new hope accompanied by new despair. Yet you live for the door opening, the slice of light, because “what next?” is the commanding question and these what-nexts are about life and death.

Conrad cannot quite be satisfied, even so, with what cinema has done for him. The cinema, in turn, cannot quite be satisfied with what Conrad has done for it. (He could surely lean down from the heavens, just once, to tell it where it is going wrong?) When there has been a meeting of imaginations, there has not always been a meeting of minds. And vice versa.

But in this Faustian transaction, Conrad may care less than we about what Mephistopheles has done with his purchase. That purchase happened long ago. The writer sold his work to buy some late-life prosperity. He earned $22,500, for instance (then a substantial sum), from the sale to Hollywood of Romance, Lord Jim, Chance and Victory. He was able to put his feet up in his beautiful villa in Kent. He had a feeling that money might acquire happiness, whatever Nostromo says. And the man who made silver the symbol of just about everything in that crowning masterpiece knew he wasn’t going to be around long enough – unless we believe in his keen-eyed continuance in Heaven – to see if a great literary oeuvre would acquire extra value on the silver screen.

Nigel Andrews is the FT’s film critic