A Crime Wave of Dickens Thieves, Mob Women : ABC’s ‘Wonderful World’ version of ‘Oliver Twist’ stars Richard Dreyfuss and is a vivid adaptation; CBS’ ‘Bella Mafia’ features hits--and misses.

Get ready for another of those blockbuster Sunday nights, this one headlining separate dramas about crime families.

One is the cunning Fagin and his pickpocketing London street urchins of ABC’s appealing, handsomely mounted new version of “Oliver Twist.” Oh, for those good old days when thieves were thieves.

Instead, Sunday also brings the Sicilian clan of “Bella Mafia,” a CBS two-parter delivering the most gloriously bad television of the year--and possibly any year--along with one of the most inept, most inane sets of mobster oafs to set foot on a sound stage. The real Mafia should sue.

How bad is “Bella Mafia”? Well, the image that’s most indelible is Vanessa Redgrave as Mama Mafioso Graziella Luciano, bending over a pot of sauce on the stove, looking as Sicilian as Chef Boy-Ar-dee.

How good is “Oliver Twist”? Think of a grim orphan workhouse in northern England, a cold, sooty, dimly lit institution of the Industrial Age where little Oliver toils under a snarling old battle-ax until age 12. Think of a city’s twisting streets and back alleys, gray and damp even in daytime, as if all London were a dungeon. And think of Richard Dreyfuss as the menacing crime boss Fagin, fitted with a fiendish growl and a formidable beak of a nose, commanding his squadron of slippery lads like a master puppeteer.

Very well done.

And to boot, just as Luka, the ludicrous homicidal lunatic in “Bella Mafia,” inherits a locket at birth that becomes the only tangible link to his parentage, so too is Oliver bequeathed by his mum, who dies giving birth to him, a locket bonding him to her wealthy family. Amazing how Charles Dickens (“Oliver Twist”) and Lynda La Plante (“Bella Mafia”) have thought alike.

Oliver won’t cash in his bit of good fortune until long after being expelled from the cruel Widow Cooley’s sweatshop and welcomed by Fagin to his teeming London underclass of young hooligans, where snitching “is the worst one man can do to another.”

The screen’s best “Oliver Twist” remains David Lean’s 1948 movie with Alec Guinness as Fagin. While adorably sweet in the ABC version, Alex Trench’s Oliver is a little bit dim for a 12-year-old whose life has been one hard knock after another. Yet this Tony Bill-directed remake is quite good, and Dreyfuss’ amiable scoundrel is much more vivid than George C. Scott’s Fagin in a lesser 1982 rendering for TV.

And nice support comes from David O’Hara as murderous Tom Sikes, Antoine Byrne as good-hearted Nancy and Elija Wood as that endearing pilferer the Artful Dodger, who in one memorable display of fast fingers gives a man a coin with one hand while lifting his wallet with the other.

Although “Oliver Twist” has a grisly side, its drollery most stands out here. That includes Fagin’s paternal self-pity about the inevitability of his boys leaving him some day. “They’ll grow up and go to jail . . . and then what will I have?” And what fun seeing Oliver get schooled in the craft of crime, and seeing his celebratory graduation day, followed by the challenge of picking his first pocket. His failure will ultimately deliver him to his rightful destiny.

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Just as it’s surely the destiny of “Bella Mafia” to achieve infamy as trash of the camp variety. By the time it ends with its climactic castration, you’ll either be laughing yourself into a hacking cough or sitting there gagging, with a paper bag over your head and cotton in your ears.

Not that CBS cares whether viewers love it or laugh at it, as long as they don’t leave it. It’s no secret that TV’s brightest believe there’s money in Mafia. “Bella Mafia” owes its slap-happy existence largely to the commercial success of “The Last Don,” the moderately less-loopy two-parter that earned huge ratings when it ran on CBS last May. If “Bella Mafia” even approaches that success, an even bigger mob of Mafia will surely follow.

One more credible than these Munchkins, you’d hope, for “Bella Mafia” is crowded with characters straight out of the funnies, in addition to being jump-started by a series of illogical, inexplicable acts, without which there would be no story. Well, we can dream.

In Sicily, the college-bound son of Don Roberto Luciano (Dennis Farina) is assassinated, leaving behind his secretly pregnant girlfriend, Sophia (Nastassja Kinski). After giving birth to the demon seed Luka, Sophia deposits this infant whom she adores with some nuns so that she can travel to Don Luciano’s Palermo villa and inform him that she’s the mother of his grandchild.

But does she ever tell him? No. Does she ever check up on her beloved kid? No. These Sicilians, go figure. Instead, Sophia hangs around the villa for months, during which Luka and his locket are adopted out by the nuns (who seem to operate like a pawn shop) and Sophia falls for and marries another of the don’s not-too-bright sons, the sweet, stammering Constantino (Richard Joseph Paul).

The rest of Part 1 is foreplay for Part 2, with the don and his rival who murdered his son, Peter Carolla (Tony Lo Bianco), trading snarls; Luka and Carolla’s gnarled and sickly son somehow winding up pals in a monastery (the resolution of this plot line is straight from Pluto); and Jennifer Tilly and Illeana Douglas joining Kinski and Redgrave as babes in mob land.

About this time, you’re thinking that the only way to salvage this is to have this foursome parade in garter belts. But “Bella Mafia” has something almost as exotic in store, starting with a massacre predicated on an epic breakdown of Mafia security, Redgrave having a fleeting stint as a shotgunning Ma Barker and all of these avenging Sicilian mob women setting up housekeeping in New York with the help of the twisted, now-adult Luka (James Marsden).

Next to Redgrave slaving over a hot stove, the scene most worthy of freeze-framing is a Mafia boss phoning in a hit on the troublesome Luka in a voice so loud that Luka is able to hear him while passing by outside. Next would be a puzzled Carolla, looking deeply into the eyes of Luka, whom he has adopted (don’t ask), and pausing several beats before figuring out what the problem is: “You’re insane!!!”

This is one of those stories throughout which you keep asking, “Why?” Britisher La Plante adapted “Bella Mafia” from her novel of the same title. You can get a migraine trying to reconcile it with the earlier superb scripts she wrote for “Prime Suspect,” her stunningly provocative series about English copper Jane Tennison that aired on PBS. Maybe it’s a case of La Plante remaining in the U.S. too long.

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* “Oliver Twist” airs on “The Wonderful World of Disney” at 7 p.m. Sunday on ABC (Channel 7). The network has rated it TV-G (appropriate for all ages).

* “Bella Mafia” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday on CBS (Channel 2). The network has rated it TV-14-SVL (may be inappropriate for children under the age of 14 because of sex, violence and coarse language).