Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Star Review

Filmed in the kind of gorgeous colour that was only apparently in existence in the late 1950s and early 60s, Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow is a delightful portmanteau comedy in the vein of Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). It pairs co-stars Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in three relatively near-the-knuckle romps. In the first, Loren plays a shady lady who exploits a loophole in the law – pregnant women and new mothers cannot be incarcerated – to forestall her eventual imprisonment, exhausting her accomplice with her fecundity. The second story is shot in and around Mastroianni’s car as he and Loren play secretive lovers suffering comic mishaps that impede their affair. The third story is the sauciest, with Loren an expensive prostitute whose date with a hilariously ‘anxious’ Mastroianna is repeatedly frustrated by a neighbouring seminarian and his granny. It also features the striptease that was later parodied by Robert Altman in Prêt-à-Porter.

Peter Wild on 10th December 2008

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Film Description

One of the most loved Italian films of all time, this saucy Italian sex trilogy was a monster success for its stars and a winner of an Oscar for best foreign film.

Adelina (Loren) sells black-market cigarettes on the streets of Naples to support her unemployed husband Carmine (Mastroianni). Caught by the police, and with a jail sentence hanging over her head, desperation sets in. She learns that she can avoid prison as long as she's pregnant. Several years and seven children later, Carmine is exhausted, so jail looks inescapable as does Adelina's contempt for Carmine.

In Milan, our second protagonist, Anna (Loren), is bored and wealthy, drives a Rolls Royce, and is having an affair with a writer (Mastroianni). She talks dreamily of running off with him, that is until one day he crashes her car...

In the third and final vignette, Loren plays Mara, a call girl from Rome, who turns the head of a naive young man training to become a Priest, prompting a run-in with his self-righteous grandmother and a vow of abstinence. Features Loren's notorious striptease, which was recreated years later by Robert Altman in Prêt-à-Porter.

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Film Details

Cast

Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren

Technical Details