Stories about three very different women and the men they attract. Adelina sells black-market cigarettes in Naples, is married to the unemployed Carmine, and faces a jail sentence. She can avoid it as long as she's pregnant. Several years and seven children later, Carmine is exhausted, so jail looks inescapable as does her contempt for Carmine. In Milan, Anna drives a Rolls, is bored, and picks up a writer. She talks dreamily of running off with him until he dents her car; that gets her emotional attention. Mara, a Roman call girl, turns the head of a naive seminarian, prompting a run-in with his granny and a vow of abstinence. Mara's fizzy lover from Bologna grows impatient.

****

Vittorio De Sica's delightful anthology comedy from 1963 pairs joined-at-the-hip costars Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in three funny stories about sex. The first finds Loren playing an impoverished woman with a jail sentence hanging over her head. A unique loophole in the law, however, keeps her out from behind bars: pregnant women and new mothers cannot be incarcerated. Forestalling her date with the pokey, this incredibly fecund felon keeps bearing children. Her lucky but exhausted accomplice is played by Mastroianni, who can't resist her siren call between deliveries. The middle vignette finds the two actors playing secretive lovers having an affair. Shot mostly from within and around his car, the pair self-consciously quibbles and keeps having comic mishaps that slow their progress. The last story is the cheekiest, featuring Loren as an expensive hooker whose date with a--shall we say "anxious"--Mastroianni is repeatedly broken up by a neighboring seminarian whose commitment to chastity has been rocked since seeing her. This tale includes Loren's famous striptease.

Excerpt of Tom Keogh's review located HERE