Television: All About Eva

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EVITA PERON

Feb. 23 and 24; NBC; 9p.m. E.S. T.

This is a part any actress would die to play. One actress did: the '40s radio performer Eva Duarte. At 17 she was an ambitious ingenue who moved up by sleeping around; at 27 she was the First Lady of Argentina, the power behind Juan Perón; at 33 she was dead of cancer. She was one smart cookie, laced with strychnine—Eva Brains and Evita Braun. As a wily teenager, she ran through lovers like a bull on the pampas; as Senora Perón, she stalked the corridas of power, sniffing for the blood of old enemies. Young Eva told a colleague she wanted to play the great ladies of history: Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, Lucrezia Borgia. Her wish was her destiny and her doom. Fate and a will of steel cast her as the avatar of all these women, and when she died her grieving lover was the nation.

Faye Dunaway, the Evita of this four-hour TV movie, has the cool, carnivorous intelligence needed to play a dictator's doxy. When the material is tepid, she puts a fire under it to make it percolate. When given a strong scene, like the dying Evita's farewell radio address, she can key several moods — weariness, coquetry, defiance — while providing the scene with a swift climactic kick. But Writer Ronald Harwood and Director Marvin Chomsky allow too much of Evita Perón to glide by on casters; and James Farentino, as Perón, looks and acts as if he could be Robert De Niro's older brother who went into accounting. One brief scene — in which Eva greets her new lover Juan with her arms and a leg sticking out seductively from behind an easy chair, like a Marcel Duchamp construction with moving parts — hints at the vibrant high camp to which Evita Perón might have aspired.

The rest is as drowsy as a hot Sunday in Buenos Aires.