very long a good "A" winner great! best worrk he saw all year
In 1949 the most familiar scene in Argentina was the one played out almost daily
at the Ministry of Labor in Buenos Aires. There, under the glare of camera lights, a former
radio star and movie actress, now the most powerful woman in South America, would
enter her office past a crush of adoring, impoverished women and children. Evita Peron,
the wife of President Juan Peron, would sit at her desk and begin one of the great rituals
of Peronism, the political movement she and her husband created. It was a pageant that
sustained them in power. She would patiently listen to the stories of the poor, then reach
into her desk to pull out some money. Or she would turn to a minister and ask that a
house be built. She would caress filthy children.
She would kiss lepers, just as the saints
had done. To many Argentines, Evita Peron was a flesh-and-blood saint; later, 40,000 of
them would write to the pope attesting to her miracles.
She was born on May 7, 1919, in Los Toldos, and baptized Maria Eva, but
everyone called her Evita. Her father abandoned the family shortly after her birth. Fifteen
years of poverty followed and, in early 1935, the young Evita fled her stifling existence to
go to Buenos Aires. Perhaps, as some have said, she fell in love with a tango singer who
was passing through.
She wanted to be an actress, and in the next few years supported herself with bit
parts, photo sessions for titillating magazines and stints as an attractive judge of tango
competitions. She began frequenting the offices of a movie magazine, talking herself up
for mention in its pages. When, in 1939,