Evita

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.

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.

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.