Evita Peron

I watched this movie when it was first aired. Now seeing it again, for the second time, i realize how bad it really is. Faye Dunaway was waaayy to old to be playing a teenager. Hell she looked like she was in her thirties. Jose ferrer as an idol was funny as hell. Balding, over weight and in my opinion too full of himself, not a good actor. Only thing that I remember James farentino for is being married to Michelle Lee, and the short lived series Cool Million. All in all poor movie and poorer actors.

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.

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.

I am not really sure about how to judge Evita.. Well I am here judging the movie, not her personality anyways... But the movie did not really help me to understand Evita nor the situation in Argentina, or Peronism... The movie was also not all bad... Also the quality is quiet poor... but well.. its old movie...

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.