Oliver's New Twist; Classics films never die, they just get remade.

Byline: Ginanne Brownell (With Kevin O'Flynn in Moscow)

It's been 167 years since "Oliver Twist" debuted in novella form, but Charles Dickens can still draw a crowd. Despite the splattering rain on a recent Saturday evening, a long queue huddled outside the Gate Cinema in London's Notting Hill, in hopes of getting tickets to Roman Polanski's version of the literary classic. In fact, that charming wraith Oliver has never stopped winning over audiences; since 1909, the beloved story has been filmed 20 times. And audiences keep coming back for more.

This autumn a spate of remade costume dramas are hitting big and small screens around the world. Keira Knightley portrays Elizabeth Bennet in the film version of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" while the BBC, in partnership with PBS's "Masterpiece Theatre" in the United States, has put together a spectacular version of Dickens's "Bleak House" starring Gillian Anderson of "The X-Files." Russian audiences recently screened a new version of Nikolai Gogol's "Deal Souls" while an adaptation of "Doctor Zhivago" is in the works for 2006. And Americans this season will see new period offerings like Thomas Hardy's "Under the Greenwood Tree" and Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped" also on public television's "Masterpiece Theatre."

Unlike hoop skirts and high collars, the period drama appears in no danger of going out of fashion any time soon. Why do they still capture our imaginations centuries on? Scriptwriter extraordinaire Andrew Davies, who has reworked everything from "Bleak House" to "Wives and Daughters," says they appeal because they combine the very simple with the very sophisticated. "They have the archetypical qualities of great fairy tales--the wonderful stories of disadvantaged girls who magically get their happy endings--combined with cute social observations, interesting, complex characters and clever plots," he says.

Since movies were invented, the costume drama has drawn the chattering classes to watch tempestuous men declare their undying love to swooning women in the rolling landscape. Ancient reruns of "Little Women," "Great Expectations" and "Wuthering Heights" are guaranteed to bring in audiences, and the epic 1967 version of John Galsworthy's "The ...