A promising new DVD company called No Shame has released their first two offerings, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and Boccaccio '70, and there's reason to celebrate. Both films are classic examples of the stylish, sexy Euro-comedies that flourished in the early '60s, and neither has been available in a decent home video version – until now.
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, the 1964 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, features Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni oozing charisma all over the place in a triptych of stories directed by the great Vittorio de Sica. The first and best sequence features Mastroianni as a lower class Neapolitan keeping his wife from jail by making sure she stays pregnant. In the brief, second sequence (really just a palate cleanser between the first and third course), Loren plays a jaded trophy wife having an affair with a writer. The third sequence, which features the famous Loren strip-tease that Robert Altman recreated 35 years later in Pret-a-Portier, has Loren as a gold-hearted hooker juggling the affectations of a devoted client and the priest-in-training who lives next door. The movie's tone is bright and mostly breezy throughout, with traces of social commentary and farce at appropriate moments, and lots of lovely local color.
Boccaccio '70 is an even rarer bird. Four different stories from four legendary Italian directors are featured, the most famous being the bizarre Fellini segment in which an enormous billboard of an outrageously endowed Anita Ekberg comes to life to taunt a local prude. De Sica is also represented here, teaming up again with La Loren for the curious tale of a carnival worker who turns out to be the grand prize in a raffle. The third heavyweight director here, Luchino Visconti, offers an intriguing look at the lengths one woman (Romy Schneider) is willing to go to stop her boyfriend from fooling around.
The film's original fourth segment, Mario Monicelli's charming glimpse of newlyweds adjusting to married life, was cut before Boccaccio '70 hit American theaters, and has never before been seen in this country. No Shame's marvelous DVD edition finally restores this lost episode, presenting the film's original 204-minute version, spread across two discs. The image quality of both Boccaccio and Yesterday is, in a word, stunning, with rich, vibrantly colored, nearly spotless widescreen transfers presented for both films.
Each DVD gives us a choice of an English dub track or the original Italian language with optional English subtitles, and extras include extensive poster and still galleries, trailers and (for Boccaccio) archival footage. Best of all are the lavishly illustrated, glossy booklets included inside each DVD – a 32-page reproduction of the original, full-color Japanese press book in Yesterday, and an oversized reprint of the original American press book in Boccaccio – a surefire indication that No Shame is a company that really cares about movies. We look forward to the good things to come from them.
-Lance Goldenberg
This article appears in May 12-18, 2005.
