Ieri oggi domani

"Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" was just the kind of crowd-pleasing, feel-good foreign film that appealed to American audiences and the Academy in 1964. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, the second De Sica film to win in that category after "Bicycle Thieves". Of course, this isn't in the same class as that neo-realist masterpiece. It comprised of three short stories, each starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. In the first she is the wife who avoids prison by getting pregnant; in the second she is a rich socialite having an affair with Mastroianni's writer, that is until he crashes her Rolls while in the third she's a Roman prostitute forced into taking a vow of chastity for a week but not beyond doing the striptease that earned the film its reputation for 'sauciness' and each story is named after the character played by Loren. It's all very jolly, sunny and likable but it's hardly Oscar material. Sophia, however, is splendid throughout.