Faye Dunaway herself up to her estranged father and a lover. I understood that dilemma well, the conflict between ambition and love, the fear of trusting someone else with your love." The film was a modest success but Dunaway received good notices for her performance. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert noted how she had never topped the work she did in "Bonnie and Clyde", and said that her career had been "rather absentminded" ever since. He praised her performance in "Oklahoma Crude", saying that she played the role with "a great deal of style", while adding, "Perhaps she has
Faye Dunaway to play the role of a mother, "which was emotionally where I wanted to be in my life", and "The First Deadly Sin" (1980), as she wanted to work with Frank Sinatra. In 1981, Dunaway played the title role in "Evita Peron", a television miniseries based on the life of the famed First Lady of Argentina. That same year, Dunaway portrayed actress Joan Crawford in the adaptation of her daughter Christina's controversial memoirs, "Mommie Dearest", in which she had depicted her adopted mother as an abusive tyrant, who only adopted her four children to promote her acting career, making quite