OVP: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963)

Film: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963)
Stars: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni
Director: Vittorio de Sica
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Foreign Language Film-Italy*...but in 1964 cause you know Oscar with foreign-language films)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Sophia Loren-click here to learn more about Ms. Loren (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Most actors who are primarily known for their work in other languages, when they win or are even nominated for an Oscar, struggle afterwards to equal that kind of success, and certainly don't go back to their native tongue for a similar international success.  Think someone like Juliette Binoche or Marion Cotillard, both of whom did critically-acclaimed work after their Oscar-winning turns, but never really captured the (American) cultural zeitgeist in the same way, and certainly their most well-known work to American audiences post-Oscar would be something like Chocolat or Inception rather than more challenging performances like Certified Copy or Two Days, One Night.

This wasn't the case in the 1960's, and Sophia Loren, more than any other actor, regularly challenged what would be considered commercial.  After her Oscar for Two Women, which she obviously won while speaking Italian, she would float for the next couple of decades between English and Italian roles, with a good deal of success.  This was evident with a movie like Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, a populist anthology comedy that won Best Foreign Language Film in 1964 at the Oscars, and was a big hit, as the 1960's was a time when audiences were flocking to foreign languages movies, which made figures like Loren or Brigitte Bardot proper international movie stars in a way we have never really seen since.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is actually three stories told back-to-back-to-back, and other than the two lead actors, the stories have little in common (other than the complications of love).  The first chapter, about a married couple who accidentally commits a crime, is easily the longest of the three, and (for my money) the best.  It has Loren & Mastroianni playing a poor couple who pulls a con on a furniture salesman, and in the process accidentally breaks the law.  However, there's a loophole where if a woman is pregnant or nursing, she can't go to jail.  To get around this, Loren's Adelina keeps getting pregnant before the deadline, and thus the couple has seven children over the course of eight years in what we'd now call a studio apartment.  It's hilarious, and honestly would have worked if they'd fleshed out a bit of the humor as a feature film.

The other two segments aren't quite as good.  The center one, where Loren (immaculately dressed by Christian Dior) is a cruel, rich, neglected wife of a millionaire industrialist on a car ride with her lover, isn't funny at all, and actually feels more like the sort of cerebral Fellini-esque movie we'd expect from Italian cinema during this era.  It's good, don't get me wrong, and intriguing, but it's not really thematic with the other two films & feels out-of-place (it's also pretty short).  The final sketch is silly fun (it's about Loren playing a prostitute who accidentally convinces her young neighbor to give up the priesthood in a fit of hormones), but it's the least successfully executed of the three, and Mastroianni's horn-dog trust fund kid isn't well-defined.

The movie features some wonderful acting from Loren-I think this might be my favorite performance from her so far this month.  Her ice queen in the second act is haunting, the sort of callous, cruel woman who only allows for one perspective (her own), and it's a great showcase against the exhausted mother of the first half and the final giddy prostitute, keeping men on a string with her "dumb but hot...but not really dumb" routine.  Mastroianni isn't as good in any of the three (though he can be forgiven considering he was giving the performance of a lifetime in 8 1/2 elsewhere in 1963), but this movie is a testament as to why Loren was so beloved in the 1960's-she could genuinely act.