Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Yes, the stories are funny and heart-warming...all three of them. And Sophia Loren ALMOST makes you think she's as mean as the millionairess she portrays, talking of her 'humanity to man' while blowing all other cars off the road, bumping into them at stop signs and screaming at poor Marcello Mastroanni for crashing the Rolls rather than hitting a child. Knowing how long Sophia longed for a child, one felt great sympathy for her as she diapered her many children in order to stay out of jail. Italy had a law similar to the English' of 'pleading her belly' to which Sophia and Marcello conform through the births of seven children. The tale of the young priest, the prostitute and the increasingly frustrated 'client' is very well acted, and you can feel the mounting passion of poor Mastroanni as every act gets interrupted at the worst moment.

Of course, I love looking at the towns of Naples, Milan and Rome with all the old streets 'unspoiled' by the modernization of today. Check this one out for some excellent acting in widely divergent roles for both Loren and Mastroanni. No wonder the Museum of Fine Arts has Mastroanni festivals....one for Loren is equally called for. They both act with their eyes, their mouths and their entire bodies!!!

This very enjoyable film may be a let down for someone expecting the heights of De Sica's Neorealist masterpieces like The Bicycle Thief or Two Women. However it is very funny in parts and is pointedly critical of Italian society in the boom years of the 1960s. Also Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are absolutely stunning to watch.

For people interested in Italy it is a fascinating commentary on the country that can border on stereotype. Naples (De Sica's hometown) is warm and happy and filled with clever types ready to outwit the system and find their own way to happiness. Milan is cold, rich, and callous. Rome is dominated by the Catholic church and the State with plenty of hypocrisy and corruption. But De Sica finds some humor in all of this.

I found it a little too sentimental but well worth watching. I wish a better (undubbed) print were available. De Sica's career was given a boost by the success of the movie and he would continue to make more great films like The Garden of the Finzi-Contini's and the underrated A Brief Vacation that focus on the injustices of the State and the hardships faced by working people.

1963's "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" was, like the previous year's "Boccaccio 70," another anthology feature, this time featuring Sophia Loren with her most frequent leading man, Marcello Mastroianni, starring in all three stories for director Vittorio De Sica. In "Adelina" they are a married couple living in a poverty stricken section of Naples, where she must dodge arrest for nonpayment on furniture by way of pregnancy; "Anna" finds her a bored socialite wed to an often absent industrialist who ultimately chooses wealth over love to Mastroianni's disappointment; and in "Mara" she plays a high priced call girl who vows to spend a week without sex to convince the young man next door to follow the call of the priesthood. Her final reel striptease remains the stuff of legend but is quite tame today, the actress considering it a most pleasing, natural performance. As a 1963 Oscar winner as Best Foreign Film it was a huge success, with both stars reuniting with De Sica for their next picture, "Marriage Italian Style."

These three stories very "Italian" indeed, are full of good humour, social observation and correct atmosphere. The direction of De Sica is superb, the acting of Mastroianni and Loren is unique and in the second and third stories we recognize the subtle and superior hand of their author, the great Zavattini. The first story takes place in a very typical popular neighbourhood of Naples where a cigarette pedlar and smuggler (Sofia Loren) discovers that the way of not going to jail for failing to pay a fine, is to get pregnant over and over and giving birth to one child after another with the problems this brings to her exhausted husband (Mastroianni). The second story shows us an aristocratic Milanese rich lady who to escape her boring life gets herself a lover on a social stratum lower to hers and finishes by valuing her Rolls Royce car more than her lover. This is perhaps the not so good of the three stories because it lacks some strength in terms of plot. Finally the third story (maybe the best of the three) is sometimes delirious and hallucinating in its very funny rhythm (Loren's acting is fabulous here) and tells us about a luxury prostitute living near the Piazza Navona in Rome who nevertheless has a soft heart and with whom a neighbour young seminarist falls in love while she plays a game of pull and let go with one of her clients who is anxious to take her to bed most unsuccessfully. This story has a surprising end and a fascinating scene of strip-tease (incomplete of course). You'll have a very amusing time watching this movie.

"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.