| Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow (Ieri, oggi, domani) – Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film in 1964 – stars Academy Award winner Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, who won Best Foreign Actor at the BAFTAs in 1965 for his performance. Vittorio De Sica – the great Italian neo-realist director of Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves – completely changes pace for this delightful comedy anthology, a trio of sexual escapades that helped make Loren and Mastroianni the two most popular Italian performers of 20th Century cinema.
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. Featuring Loren's notorious striptease, which was recreated years later by Robert Altman in Prêt-à-Porter.
Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow has, we are assured, never looked better than in the officially-licenced high-definition restoration that is to be released on UK DVD by Eureka for the first time ever on DVD in the UK on 26th January 2009 at the RRP of £17.99, uncut and in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The transfer, as you would expect, will be anamorphic. |
