Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Like Marriage Italian Style, the earlier Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is a film by Vittorio De Sica that is so ebulliently Italian that you may smell the Parmesan while watching. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film for 1964, and featured one of the greatest of cinematic teams, Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, in three different stories set in different cities in Italy.

The first and longest is "Adelina," which takes place in the poor section of Naples. Mastroianni is perpetually unemployed, and the family gets by with his wife, Loren, selling black market cigarettes. She is fined, but does not pay, and will go to jail, until she finds out that she can not go to jail if she is pregnant or nursing. She and her hapless husband proceed to forestall the imprisonment by having seven children, until he is too exhausted to continue. Loren then has to decide if another will do the job, or she will go to prison.

The second story, "Anna," is about a Milanese women of leisure. She is driving a Rolls, and picks up her lover, who makes far less money. He feels inferior, but she insists she is mad about him. That is, until the Rolls gets in an accident, and he finds out exactly what her priorities are.

The final installment sees Loren as a high-class prostitute, who sees men of great wealth and power. One of the is Mastroianni, who is a neurotic son of an industrialist. But he is constantly interrupted by the goings-on in the apartment next door, where a young seminarian has fallen in love with her, much to the horror of his grandmother.

This is all great, bouncy fun, and outside of Fellini, is probably the definitive '60s Italian film. It shows us the poor, the rich, and the in-between, and touches on the nation's devotion to Catholicism and to luxury.

A very famous scene has Loren doing a striptease while Mastroianni is on the bed, barely able to contain himself and howling like a dog. This scene was replicated years later in Robert Altman's Pret-a-Porter.