Letter to Eva

Spain emerged from the Second world war with its cities and infrastructure more or less intact--bearing in mind the bombardments from the rebel air force--but with a terrible political problem: no big western country wants to trade with a country that had supported the Axis during the war. The only country that wants to trade with Franco's regime is Argentina, run with an iron fist and cynical humour by Juan Peron. Desperately, with his people on the verge of starvation, Franco asks Peron to visit. Peron counters with an offer of Eva, the spectacular goddess of the poor. The two episodes of Carta a Eva have a running battle between Dona Carmen, Franco's wife, and Eva Peron whose love of the working class smacks too much of Marxism for Dona Carmen's liking.

I give the highest rating to Julieta Cardinali, who not only plays Eva very well but looks so much like her they could be twins. Ana Torrent, the little girl in Erice's Espiritu de la colmena, plays Dona Carmen very well: dry, obsessed with propriety and tiresome for everybody around her. Jesus Castejon is Franco, the calm that hides a ruthless temperament (at one point he says his hand doesn't tremble as he signs execution warrants and you believe him). The second plot of the terrorists arrested after they plant a bomb is not as effectively worked out, although Nora Navas is good as one of the condemned.