Who can resist that pathetic scene? "Please, sir, I want some more."

Sometimes it seems that Dickens must have written for the movies. Small wonder that Oliver Twist has been a favourite of screen adaptations since the early silent era. And while every film changes or compresses the plot in some way, it always includes that orphanage dinner tableau. The picture of little Oliver with his bowl held out for more gruel has remained as iconic of humanitarian liberalism throughout the twentieth century as it was of reform in Dickens's time.

It's further interesting to note how the other standard elements of the Oliver Twist story have fared. However many changes may be wrung by the myriad adaptations, certain elements are always present, though played up more or less. For instance, the character of Fagin as the misleader of young boys into criminal pursuits is always a dramatic hub of the story, with his Jewishness emphasized to different degrees. He ranges from a common criminal whose race is incidental to a virtual Shylock complete with hooked nose, hanging locks and unrelieved rapaciousness for coin.

Little Oliver
The first talking Oliver Twist (1933) falls into the latter camp with Irving Pichel's evil take on Fagin. Pichel who made his career playing ethnic villains, is all gleaming eyes, stooping shoulders, and whinging voice, practically cackling over rubbed hands.

The other characters are similarly stagy, overacted with their faces as though the actors thought they were still playing in the silent flicks. The only natural one is child star Dickie Moore. Though he's just seven years old, this is his thirty-eighth film. Not much of an actor though—just a kid seeming to have fun following directions. At one time when Oliver's running away, for no discernible reason he's encouraged to perform somersaults for passing carriage riders, and he does so charmingly.

Moore is too young and small, practically a toddler, to be Dickens's Oliver, while the gang of pickpockets he falls in with, including Charlie Bates and the Artful Dodger (another iconic Dickens figure), are way too old—in their thirties and older. My sense of the book is that the young miscreants should be only a few years older than Oliver, maybe 13 or 14 to his 10 or 11. Not that a film adaptation has to be a slave to the book. But the wide age difference in this film makes the gang's efforts to recruit Oliver seem less like criminal mentoring than a case of child abuse.

To fit the story into 80 minutes, the plot is telescoped more than in later adaptations. We practically go right from the orphanage dinner scene to Oliver lighting out for London, with no stopover as an undertaker's apprentice. Later, when he's led to breaking into a house with the London gang, it turns out to be the same house that he had previously been taken in by and thus he's immediately recovered by his friends and saviours without the complicated intrigues of the novel. Also missing are three-quarters of the subsidiary characters created by Dickens, including the seemingly pivotal Mr. Monks.

Surprisingly though, this is one of the rare adaptations that includes Fagin's final scene in prison before his execution, when Oliver visits him and an insane Fagin deludes himself into thinking the boy is sneaking him out.

Despite its problems, this Oliver Twist has to be credited as a good first attempt, especially by Hollywood standards. The spirit of Dickens is retained and the viewer who can make allowances for early filmmaking is assured of a relatively entertaining hour or so. See it first, if you can, so you'll appreciate the greater Oliver Twists to come.

Master Oliver
Leave it to the Brits again to really get it right. David Lean's 1948 Oliver Twist is about as perfect an adaptation of a classic as you can imagine in the single-episode format.

The cast is stellar. At the centre is John Howard Davies, age nine, in his first of only a handful of acting roles (Davies went on to a long career as a director and producer) but perfect as Oliver Twist. The role does not require as much acting as reacting, as Oliver is a boy to whom things happen but, I suspect, good direction helped him react naturally to each situation, rather than play the same note of pathetic victimhood over and over.

Stealing the movies though, as they should, are Alec Guinness as Fagin and Robert Newton as Sikes. Guinness is, as he often is in his roles, almost unrecognizable: beneath the miser makeup, fake beard and huge nose is a man who can not only scheme and brutalize but can entertain the boys with delightful turns and, when things are going badly, can make us feel his anxiety. Newton is the most malevolent Sikes imaginable, mainly because he seems so real. His mate and victim, Nancy, is also played brilliantly by Kay Walsh, Lean's wife at the time. Even the erstwhile beadle Mr. Bumble is a joy to watch, as his larger part is restored in this version and essayed by the chubby veteran character actor Francis L. Sullivan (just two years after he played Mr. Jaggers in Lean's Great Expectations). And watch for a young Anthony Newley as a terrific Artful Dodger.

Until near the end, Lean's production is faithful to the plot, very much more so than the Hollywood film version. We get all the key scenes from the novel, including the fight at the undertakers, the Beadle-Matron courtship, and Sikes's desperate flight across the rooftops. An innovation here though is Sikes tries to take Oliver along with him, putting the boy in jeopardy in a way he wasn't in the book.

And the relationships of the last part of the book, resolved in such a complicated fashion by Dickens, are greatly simplified. Oliver turns out to be Mr. Brownlow's grandson, that's all—cutting out eighty pages of subplots. At just under two hours, the film makes exactly the right decisions as to what to keep and what to lose.

Most importantly though, Oliver Twist is directed masterfully. Every scene, starting with the opening storm leading to the workhouse birth of the boy, is visually and emotionally engaging. One can forget about comparing the movie to the book and just sit back to enjoy the cinematic experience. At under two hours, this film may not present the same experience as reading Dickens but this movie is a work of art in its own right, crafted with as much skill and passion.

Musical Oliver
It was inevitable that a musical version of Dickens's second most popular story would eventually be created, I suppose. And 1968's Oliver!, based on a lauded Broadway production, was considered a great success, winning a slew of Academy Awards and launching several songs that people are still humming decades later ("Consider Yourself", "Who Will Buy This Wonderful Morning", "You Gotta Pick a Pocket or Two", "Where Is Love"). And the film is still a favourite, to judge by movie site comments.

But it's ain't Dickens. Way too cheerful for one thing. Dickens did include plenty of comedy and light touches in even his most serious dramas. But Oliver! (that exclamation point gives it away before the movie even begins) is almost unrelenting in its cheeriness. All that singing and dancing that sometimes seems to go on forever. At least three times the plot comes to a dead stop to accommodate production numbers taking over what seems to be the entire city—once, just when it seems impossible it could get any bigger, bringing in an entire parade.

And it's so squeaky clean. The slums of London are picturesquely slummy. The urchins, starting with Oliver and the Artful Dodger, are cute as heck and strategically scuffed. Nancy looks like a Beatle girlfriend circa 1966, with gleaming blond hair and pretty frocks. Even the thug Bill Sikes, played with due malevolence by Oliver Reed, is magnetically thuggish.

And Fagin. Ron Moody won accolades for reprising his stage role in the film as the lovable scoundrel.... What, you didn't know from the book that Fagin was such a sweetheart? Sure, he's mercenary here but, underneath that, heart of gold all the way. Which requires a major rewrite of Dickens's pathetic end for the old gent. Oliver! closes with him and the Dodger literally singin' and dancin' off into the sunset to a bright future life of petty crime.

As could be predicted, Oliver's back story is given short shrift, Monks is dropped from the plot altogether, Mr. Brownlow's household is reduced substantially, and the boy's revealed heritage simplified.

So, is Oliver! worth seeing? Not for Dickens, not for Oliver Twist, but maybe for a British version of a big-budget, Hollywood-style musical.

Essential Oliver
Roman Polanski's take on Oliver Twist in 2005 is in some ways an expansion on Lean's 1948 film—and in other ways a contraction of that film.

This film runs an extra fourteen minutes but it fits in additional subplots and nuances in the main, middle part of the story only by excising huge chunks at both ends. It is somewhat unnerving for a viewer familiar with the Oliver story to be initially thrown into the tale when the boy is already eight and brought to the orphanage, just in time for the dinner scene. And over two hours later it can be a letdown to have the film end suddenly with Oliver heading home with Mr. Brownlow, minus any relation between them apart from that of a waif and a benefactor. The elements of the narrative concerning Oliver's birth, his inheritance, and the scheme to defraud him are all missing.

But it has to be said, this works very, very well. Polanski and writer Ronald Harwood have created a conventional version of Oliver Twist that nonetheless updates it for modern sensibilities. All that stuff about the poor kid secretly being entitled to affluence was a staple of sentimental Victorian fiction. And somehow the morality tale plays better today when Mr. Brownlow is seen as acting out of sympathy for a deserving youth, rather than out of some convoluted familial and personal obligations.

Barney Clark is the latest in a long line of winsome Olivers. He's blond, pale, thin enough to suggest malnutrition, and going on twelve—perhaps slightly older than required. Cedric Hardwicke (best known on TV as Dr. Watson to Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes) is a compassionate Mr. Brownlow, striking the right note of liberal concern for this Twist.

But the heart of this Oliver Twist, as for all others before, is the old fence Fagin and his young gang of pickpockets. Ben Kingsley may be the greatest actor to have played Fagin. He takes Guinness's portrayal and turns it up a humanistic notch or two.

The friends of Oliver
Now here's a twist. Most short or medium-length adaptations of Oliver Twist save time by condensing or eliminating the subplots to focus on Oliver's own pathetic progress. The 2007 Oliver Twist, adapted for three hours of television time, actually directs greater attention to the background characters and stories, refashioning them in the process. And it really works. It may not be as Dickens wrote it, but it may be as Dickens would write it if he could organize Oliver Twist all together, rather than in instalments spread over two years, making up segment as they came up.

Oliver's inheritance, the intrigues of Mr. Monks, and Mr. Monks's relationship with the Brownlow family are woven into the main plot more directly. More excitingly, the intrigues among Fagin, Sikes, Nancy and the Artful Dodger are developed realistically and with great attention to each character's personality and inner conflicts. Plus the Bumbles get their due for once in a movie, without seeming to be there as mere plot devices.

Ironically the master of this holistic rewriting of Dickens is Sarah Phelps, best known as a writer for British episodic television (The East Enders). The director pulling it together so naturalistically is one Coky Giedroyk, also known for her TV work.

The actors too bring new dimensions to the characters. Fagin in the hands of Timothy Spall is now more of a den mother to the young gang, a somewhat fat and effeminate old rascal, torn between his devotion to the lads and his sense of self-preservation. No such contradiction is found in Bill Sikes, played chillingly and powerfully by Tom Hardy as a modern psychopath without a shred of humanity in those dark, dark eyes. What childhood traumas made him that way, the performance forces us to ask. And Nancy—the facilitator, the abused and conscience-stricken mate, who stands by him because, despite all evidence to the contrary, she thinks that deep down he's really not that bad—and who pays dearly for her love. It may be historically inaccurate to cast black actor Sophie Okonedo in the role, but Okonedo becomes the most memorable Nancy of them all, a truly brilliant and heart-rending performance.

Even the usually bland roles of Mr. Brownlow and his ward Rose are heightened in this retelling. Venerable British standby Edward Fox turns in one of his most varied performances as the gentleman who is kind, suspicious, naive and hardened all at once.

And then there's the Dodger—a major character in the novel who becomes comic relief in most film treatments. But here the young thief is revealed as having a crush on Nancy, being jealous of the attention given Oliver by Fagin and Nancy, resenting the implication that the boy may not be "nuthin', like the rest of us", and feeling guilt for his part in bringing down those he loves. (My one regret is that we do not follow newcomer Adam Arnold further in the role.)

Almost forgot Oliver. Isn't that telling? But it's no fault of eleven-year-old William Miller. It's to his credit really. His self-contained Oliver, far from some of the showy or cutesy or too precious-for-words Olivers of the past, allows the story and the figures to shine around him.

A word should also be said about the look of this presentation. The grey and brown tones of the film help make early nineteenth-century London as grim and grimy as it must have been for the lower classes. There's nothing Hollywood about the miserable appearance of the people—you practically smell their clothes and you avert your eyes from their bad teeth, running sores and lack of personal hygiene. Not a film to be dining before.

But it is an involving film that doesn't rely on following the Oliver Twist formula but forges a new, fulfilling vision of the classic tale.