While I was looking through a blog for another literature course that I had taught, I found an entry on filmmaker Orson Welles' adaptation of Heart of Darkness, one of his many projects that never reached completion for various reasons (political, economic, psychological). Welles was working on his adaptation of Heart of Darkness in 1939. This would have been about the time that Germany attacked Poland, Great Britain entered the war, and the United States was officially neutral. Even though many Americans were beginning to realize what Hitler was "up to," many others (like Charles Lindbergh, for example) did not believe that we should be involved in Europe's war. And, yes, Welles' Heart of Darkness appears to have been "political," portraying Kurtz as a charismatic fascist, and, as Clinton Heylin suggests, this film was never made because of its politics.
I guess I had better look a little further for an apolitical Heart of Darkness!
Until then, here is a link to a site about another of Welles' projects: The Mercury Theater, a radio program whereby he adapted a number of novels, plays, and short stories for performance on the radio. Conrad's novella was one of the works that Welles adapted. Oddly enough, it is paired with a lighter story, "Life with Father."http://www.mercurytheatre.info
For more information about Welles' Heart of Darkness, see this article from The Guardian:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1429851,00.html
Or this entry from a blog on Welles and his art:
http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=78
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