EDITOR’S NOTE: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 1, 1969. How did an Italian romantic film get on Chilly Billy? For some of 1969, the show became known as The Saturday Late Show, with Bill Cardille hosting the first movie from a living room setting. During the second feature, Chilly Billy returned to the lab.
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Ieri, oggi, domani) is a three-part anthology film that is essentially a glossy, cynical, sensual tour of Italian socio-economic hypocrisy. It’s light and breezy, yet beneath the sun-drenched glamour lies a darkly comic realization: people are shameless opportunists, and love is usually just a negotiation.
The first segment, “Adelina of Naples,” starts in the chaotic, working-class Naples district of Forcella in 1954. Sophia Loren plays Adelina, a woman who supports her lazy, unemployed husband, Carmine (Marcello Mastroianni), by slinging black-market cigarettes. When the authorities come to repossess her furniture over an unpaid fine, the neighborhood executes a synchronized furniture-hiding routine that would put heist movies to shame. But her legal troubles don’t stop there. A local lawyer points out a wild loophole in Italian law: a woman cannot be imprisoned while pregnant or within six months after giving birth.
Adelina’s solution? Stay permanently pregnant.
What follows is a hilarious, exhausting saga of birth after birth. After seven kids in eight years, Carmine’s libido completely surrenders under the sheer strain of mandatory reproductive duty. When he physically can’t keep up, Adelina considers recruiting their pal Pasquale, before ultimately deciding to take her chances with the law. She goes to jail, the entire neighborhood rallies together, buys back her freedom and petitions for a pardon.
This story was based on Concetta Muccardi, a Neapolitan street vendor of contraband cigarettes. She had 19 pregnancies to avoid going to prison, outliving 14 of her children.
In “Anna of Milan,” Loren plays Anna, a rich, completely unfulfilled housewife whose industrialist husband only cares about balance sheets. To cure her existential dread, she picks up her lover Renzo (Mastroianni)—a lower-class writer who thinks he’s stepped into a romantic fantasy—in her husband’s shiny Rolls-Royce. While cruising through the countryside, Anna rambles on about running away together, waxing poetic about passion, freedom and escaping her gilded cage. She hands the wheel to Renzo to prove her trust. Naturally, Renzo swerves to avoid a kid selling flowers and smashes the Rolls-Royce straight into a tractor.
The moment the chrome crumples, the romance dies instantly.
Anna doesn’t check if Renzo is okay. She looks at the dent, throws a total fit over her car and hitches a ride home with the very next luxury vehicle that rolls by—leaving a bewildered Renzo stranded on the side of the road. He buys a bouquet of flowers from the boy out of obligation, throws them away in disgust and walks off. It’s a bitter, perfect punchline: rich people don’t want freedom; they just want nice cars.
In “Mara of Rome,” we find ourselves in a rooftop apartment overlooking Rome’s Piazza Navona. Mara (Loren) is a high-end sex worker with a client list full of wealthy, neurotic fools—chief among them Augusto (Mastroianni), the whiny son of a Bologna industrialist who just wants what he paid for. Things get complicated when Mara befriends Umberto, a naive young seminarian visiting his grandparents next door. Umberto falls head over heels for Mara (who claims she’s a manicurist) and decides to throw away his vows to the Church to be with her. Meanwhile, his strict grandmother spots Mara’s real profession and threatens to start a holy war to get her evicted.
Feeling guilty for inadvertently corrupting a future priest, Mara makes a deal with God: if she can talk Umberto into going back to the seminary, she’ll take a strict one-week vow of celibacy. After a chaotic family intervention where Mara successfully lectures the kid into returning to the priesthood, she goes back to her apartment, where poor Augusto has been waiting all afternoon. To reward him, she performs an iconic, legendary striptease—only to stop dead in her tracks at the last minute because she remembers her celibacy vow. Instead of getting what he paid for, a weeping, desperate Augusto ends up kneeling on the floor, praying with her.
Mara’s famous rooftop striptease wasn’t just improvised charisma; Sophia Loren was specifically coached for the scene by Jacques Ruet, the head choreographer from the legendary Paris cabaret club Crazy Horse. Yes, when your club is named by no less a source than Motley Crue — “Crazy Horse, Paris, France; Forgot the names, remember romance” — you’re set.
Directed by Vittorio De Sica and produced by Carlo Ponti (who also happened to be married to Loren), the film was a massive international juggernaut. It pulled in over $9 million in North America alone, making it the third highest-grossing Italian film in the U.S. at the time, trailing only La Dolce Vita and 8½. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 37th Academy Awards in 1965, cementing the Loren/Mastroianni pairing as the undisputed king and queen of global cinema.
Critics at the time loved to sniff at it—John Simon famously dismissed it as an “overrated dud,” while The New Yorker snickered that it was just a “club sandwich” of a movie. But who cares? De Sica knew exactly what he was doing. Underneath the glossy Technicolor and the comedic set pieces, he offered a sharp, cynical look at Italian society. A place where the poor use babies as shields against the state, the rich treat people like disposable car parts and the holy trade their salvation for a glance at a rooftop window.
You can watch this on Tubi.
