Evita Peron

If you've read my reviews, you know one of my famous phrases is that most actors have two sides to their acting; if you watch the wrong movies first you probably won't like them. Some might really appreciate all the work it looked like she put into Evita Peron, but I didn't like Faye Dunaway's performance as the famed Argentine. It felt very melodramatic, for the most part, especially once she got together with Juan Peron (portrayed by James Farentino) and entered the political realm. In the beginning, when she's young and trying to be an actress, she puts a little more subtleties into her performance when trying to convey her innocence. But after her innocence is taken away from her by José Ferrer (although no one forced her to run away from home and approach him in his private train car), she learns that she can trade sex for favors. In her quest to become a famous actress, she climbs the ladder quite easily. Then, she turns into the Faye Dunaway from Network and Mommie Dearest. I tend to feel something is lost when an actor is obviously trying to hit the back row. I considered the possibility that Faye was "trying to hit the back row" on purpose to show how Evita got corrupted by power and was always performing; but shouldn't she have given some contrast in her private moments so the audience could understand?

I do appreciate the work that went into this miniseries, and I liked seeing Katy Jurado still working into her old age, playing Faye's mother. Faye clearly studied Evita's mannerisms and gestures, but it was a constant reminder that this was a Hollywood production to hear her regular "affected" accent. She was cast to play an Argentine, and she was surrounded by a cast who mostly spoke in Spanish accents (the occasional American was very distracting), and yet she just spoke like she did in all her other movies. She was very American, and very obviously Faye Dunaway.

If she's your favorite actress, and you feel she can do no wrong, go ahead and rent this. I tend to like her subtleties better, like in Chinatown and Hurry Sundown.

Made for TV movie about the life and death of Argentina's first lady, Eva Peron and her husband Colonel Juan Peron. Dunaway does a fairly good job in the title role, but one can clearly see she overreacts (very similiar to how she does in Mommie Dearest) in many of the important scenes.

Dunaway was absolutely wrong for the part of Evita Peron, from start to finish. As with nearly all her roles, she played it all with out-sized shoulder-pads and overblown line delivery. What's worse, the film looks like it was shot in some dingy Mexican border town instead of the opulent capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires. The building they'd chosen for the iconic Casa Rosada looks something like an old Spanish war prison in Baja.

They have the chronology fairly correct, but little else is really accurate or even compelling drama in this adaptation of history. Peron launched a mass movement that transformed Argentina, at the time one of the biggest economic forces in the world, and his wife was a highly complex, colorful public person who worked herself to death for him and won the hearts of his political base with her naive, crypto-fascist concepts of the state's role as a mother to its people.

This film, sadly, portrays it all like a story arc on some Dynasty rip-off, set in some unrecognizable banana republic.

This is purely for die-hard Faye fanatics, and certainly NOT for any fans of the Peron story.

Yes, many of the clichés about Eva Peron are presented here and certainly there are errors of historical detail.

While Faye Dunnaway overacts, there is a pleasantly restrained interpretation of the role of Juan Peron by a youngish Jim Farentino, who passed away early in 2012. He makes the Colonel seem rather likable: an easygoing, mildly dissolute, somewhat corruptible and none too ambitious army officer in whom the fiercely ambitious Evita saw possibilities.

Juan Peron completely lacked his wife's bitter vindictiveness, also.

In an iconic scene it was Evita who advised him to take off his jacket when addressing a crowd of union workers in Argentina's important meat packing industry, transforming the previously stiff and awkward Colonel to a man of the people and the people to his devoted followers.

As one who has a long-standing interest in the Peron regime, I really looked forward to the release of movie on television. I found it a big disappointment, mostly due to a bad script. It was a pastiche of scenes based on the biographies available at the time, one of which was the notoriously slanted and inaccurate Woman with the Whip. One particularly bad segment showed the Signe Hasso character who had helped Evita as a young actress. When she (Hasso) meets her (Peron) later after she is in power she refuses to take money from her, and gratuitously insults her, ending up in a jail cell. The point of the scene was that Evita was a vindictive woman (she was) who turned on those who had once been her friends (she did), but the scene as presented was pointless and contrived. Another egregious error had Peron running for president against Farrell (he did not - Farrell was his friend). It would be like having a movie about Nixon where he ran for president against Eisenhower. One thing that was interesting is that both Signe Hasso and Jose Ferrer were in the movie, and in the 1950 film Crisis they played a South American dictatorial couple who many thought more than superficially resembled the Perons. Just an interesting (to me) coincidence.