Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.0

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blu-ray Movie Review

Sophia Loren teases, leaves us wanting more.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater May 16, 2011

Actor-turned-director Vittorio De Sica is best known as a major figure in the Italian neorealist movement of the 1940s and early 1950s, a “cinema of the poor”—as late producer Dino De Laurentiis described it—that explored post-war poverty and other social issues by shooting on location in working class neighborhoods and using predominantly non-professional actors. De Sica’s Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, and Umberto D. all loom large in the neorealist canon, but as the director got older—and Italy got richer during a period of prosperous reconstruction—he turned increasingly to lighter, often comic fare. Although he never produced another “masterpiece” after 1953’s Umberto D., many of his later efforts are fun, stylish, and distinctly Italian, including several films starring a cinematic pairing that’s hard to top: sex-siren Sophia Loren and the handsome lead of Fellini’s 8 1/2, Marcello Mastroianni. Of these, the best is arguably Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, a three-part anthology movie that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1964.

In a sense, the film is a cross-section of Italian society in the years since the war, and the first story—set in a poor neighborhood in Naples in 1953— is a lighthearted look back at a scenario De Sica might have treated much more somberly in his neorealist days. Loren plays Adelina, a dutiful young wife who supports her child and out-of-work husband, Carmine (Mastroianni), by illegally selling black market Marlboros on the street. She gets levied with a massive fine they can’t afford to pay, and there’s a clever scene where all of the neighbors pitch in to help hide Adelina and Carmine’s furniture when the repo men come to collect the couple’s possesions. Adelina is informed she’ll be jailed if she doesn’t pay the fine, but she discovers a bizarre legal loophole: if she’s pregnant, she can’t be taken to prison. Women are given half a year to nurse an infant before they can be incarcerated, so whenever that six-month window comes around, Adelina makes sure she’s got another bun in the oven. This is played for laughs. With each new kid, Adelina seems to get even more beautiful while Carmine grows harried and weak from too much sex. By the seventh baby, he’s completely spent—he can no longer perform—and Adelina is faced with a dilemma: does she go to prison, or does she tempt Carmine’s best friend, Pasquele (Aldo Giuffrè), into knocking her up? Without giving away too much, the conclusion is absolutely joyous, a celebration of family, love, and neighborly generosity.

The second part is shorter, more serious, and tends to be viewed as the weakest of the three tales, but it works as a slice-of-life view of upper-crust infidelity. Here, Loren—decked out from head to toe in Christian Dior—plays Anna, a rich Milanese housewife whose workaholic industrialist husband is out of the country on business. As she drives around the city in a late-model Rolls-Royce, Anna gives us a stream of consciousness narration about the mundane details of her life—this initial scene is filmed in first person—and we get a sense from her tone that she’s not exactly the kindest, nor most altruistic person. She picks up her distinctly middle class lover, Renzo (Mastroianni), and the two spend the day driving around, casually looking for a place to pull over and make love, but mostly just talking. One of the running gags is that whenever Anna pulls up to a red light, she always lightly bumps into the car in front of her and then relishes the fact that the driver won’t say anything to her about it because she’s obviously wealthy. Anna claims to love Renzo precisely because he isn’t a materialist, but their attitudes toward one another are challenged when he gets behind the wheel of the Rolls and accidentally crashes it. This is one of those illuminating events that suddenly makes both parties’ priorities blindingly clear, and if it seems like the conclusion to a short story, that’s because this section was written by noted Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, whose works inspired several films, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist and Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt.

The final section has gone down in cinema history for its iconic strip-tease finale—later recreated in Robert Altman’s Ready to Wear—in which Loren slowly disrobes, revealing a thigh-high-and-garters get-up, while Mastroianni sits on the bed with knees folded up to his chest, leering excitedly and letting out uncontrollable wolf howls. It’s funny and sweet and sexy all at once, and the same could be said about the entire short. Here, Loren plays Mara, a high-class prostitute not unlike Sasha Grey’s character in Steven Soderbergh’s recent film The Girlfriend Experience, in that her services include more than just sex—she’s a companion, a friend, a muse. Mara’s most adoring client, Augusto (Mastroianni), the eccentric son of a wealthy business magnate, is cheerfully obsessed with her and stops by whenever he’s feeling amorous. His romantic urges are continually foiled, however, when Mara attracts the attention of a young acolyte priest (Gianni Ridolfi) who lives next door with his grandparents. The priest-in-training falls for her hard, and when he threatens to leave the seminary, the boy’s pious grandmother makes Mara her sworn enemy. In a neighborly compromise, Mara vows to abstain from sex for a week and, with Augusto’s assistance, concentrate her efforts on convincing the priest that he’s better off taking the holy route through life. For his help, the now unbearably horny Augusto is rewarded with a strip- tease, but alas, a cruel tease is all that it is, as Mara remembers her temporary vow of chastity right before she starts to unclasp her bra, leaving the poor john—and we viewers—in need of a cold shower. It’s a perfect ending; De Sica clearly knew it’s always best to leave the audience wanting more.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

As a smaller company than Criterion, Kino doesn't always have the means to do complete restorations on the titles they release, but if their Blu-ray output so far has shown us one thing, it's that they're committed to putting out films in their purest, most true-to-source form possible. This is certainly true with Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer, which exhibits some specks, mild scratches, and a few hairs stuck in the camera gate—minor print issues that could've been removed in a frame-by-frame clean up—but the film's grain structure is entirely natural and there's no trace of edge enhancement or other forms of digital tweaking. The image itself is a little soft, but this is to be expected, as the film was shot using the then-new Techniscope 2-perf process, an economical solution that used roughly half of a 35mm frame, resulting in slightly diminished clarity and more noticeable grain. Still, the film looks great in high definition, and it's certainly a huge improvement over prior DVD releases. Color is handled beautifully too, with deep blacks and an abundance of warm, creamy tones. Compression isn't an issue—the film fits comfortably on a single-layer disc— but I did notice a single digital glitch in the first section, at 34:38, where Pasquele's cigarette case seems to jitter for a split-second. I'm not sure what might've caused this, but it's gone before you even realize it, and it never happens again. All in all, a worthy upgrade if you're a fan of the film. Who can pass up on Sophia Loren in high definition?

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Kino has also given the film a faithful Dolby TrueHD 1.0 track. Obviously, given the limitations of the recording process and low-budget sound design at the time, you shouldn't expect miracles from this mono mix, but for the most part the film sounds wonderful. Some of the looped-in dialogue is a bit obvious, and voices aren't quite as clear as what you'd hear in a more contemporary film, but everything is intelligible at least, with no hissing, pops, or drop-outs. And despite a rather squashed dynamic range, Armando Trovajoli's score has a nice presence, and lacks the tinny high-end you sometimes expect from 1960s films. No complaints here. The disc includes optional English subtitles.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Blu-ray disc itself only sports 1080p trailers for Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (4:12), Marriage Italian Style (1:50), and Sunflower (3:59), along with a high definition stills gallery, but the real treat is on the also-included DVD, which contains Vittorio D. (SD, 1:35:26), a feature-length documentary about the life, career, and legacy of the influential actor/director. Here, you'll find extensive interviews with De Sica's surviving family and fellow filmmakers, including Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, Mike Leigh, John Landes, and more. The film covers just about everything, from his years as an actor and role in the neorealist movement, to his love of gambling and left-wing politics. Vittorio D. is worth the price of admission alone, so the fact that it's bundled in with Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow makes this release even more of a must-have for fans of Italian cinema.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Funny. Sexy. Sweet. Sophia Loren…strip-tease…in high definition. Do I need to go on? Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow may not have the dramatic weight and social scope of De Sica's earlier, neorealist films, but it's a terrific anthology comedy that belongs in the collection of anyone who loves Italian cinema. That this release also includes the feature-length Vittorio D. documentary on DVD only sweetens the deal. Highly recommended!