Review of Yesterday Today Tomorrow [US Import]

A crowdpleasing trio of sex comedies with Loren and Mastroianni at their most likeable

NB - As is their wont, Amazon have unhelpfully bundled the reviews for the various different releases and formats of this film together. This review refers to Kino Lorber's US Blu-ray release.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow grabbed the Best Foreign Film Oscar and was a big hit with international audiences, and while it's far from high art, it's not difficult to understand why. It's a glossy crowd-pleasing trio of sex comedies starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni that, by the sheer virtue of being foreign, gets away with far more than Hollywood pictures of the day could. Not that it's that risqué by modern standards, but it makes no bones about what its stars are really after. In the first, Adelina, Loren is one of the legion of women selling contraband cigarettes on the streets of Naples who finds that she can stay out of jail as long as she is pregnant - so she sets husband Mastroianni to ensuring that she's always pregnant whenever the police arrive every 15 months: fine at first, but after six children he can barely stand... The second and shortest, Anna, sees Loren's rich trophy wife trying to convince Mastroianni's journalist that she's not really interested in money only for an accident in her new Rolls Royce to test her real priorities. The final story, Mara, is the one that earned the film its place in the iconic scenes Hall of Fame for the striptease Loren's high-class courtesan performs for Mastroianni's pervy civil servant (something the filmmakers were smart enough to keep for the film's grand finale). It's really almost an afterthought to the plot itself, which sees the disapproving next-door neighbours' grandson decide to chuck in life in the seminary in favour of more earthly pursuits with La Loren...

Unusually for the continental anthology films of the period, Vittorio De Sica directs all three tales, and shows a light, populist touch and a great eye for his locations that yields pleasing results. None of the stories are particularly outstanding in themselves, but they're all played and packaged so likeably that it doesn't matter. Loren and Mastroianni bring different sides of their talents to all three of their roles while oozing screen chemistry together in the process - both stars have rarely been as likeable as they are in the first story - and the whole thing is perfectly packaged. Giuseppe Rotunno's colourful Scope photography and the pleasing score by Armamdo Trovajoli, who cameos as the sports car driver in the second story, keeping things bright, breezy and attractive regardless of the characters' income brackets - De Sica may have made his name with The Bicycle Thieves, but he'd left neo-realism far enough behind by then to ensure that even the poor sections of Naples look gorgeous.

The film has a very chequered history on DVD, with many atrocious Public Domain releases boasting poor picture quality or dubbed soundtracks. Kino Lorber's region-free English subtitled Italian language Blu-ray release may not be perfect, but it's almost certainly the best the film has looked on home video, with a very respectable 2.35:1 transfer that isn't quite as good as some might like but certainly does the film's rich colour scheme justice even if the definition shows the limitations of the cost-cutting Techniscope process used to shoot the film (often dubbed the poor man's CinemaScope, instead of squeezing the image on a single frame with an anamorphic lens, it would print two unsqueezed images on the same area with an ordinary lens, thus using only half the amount of film stock but also ensuring a loss of picture quality as well). A decent package of extras includes the film's Italian trailer (which includes an alternate take of the striptease) as well as trailers for Kino's other Loren titles, a brief stills gallery and, on a separate DVD, a feature length documentary on the director, Vittorio D, which includes interviews with Loren, Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen and others.