"
Vogliamo i Colonnelli" ("
We Want the Colonels") is a quite well-known 1973 Italian tragicomedy, openly spoofing to some extent the attempted coup by Junio Valerio Borghese (for that, see the
Wikipedia entry) which had recently come to light, but also incorporating facts that happened sometime later.
The movie follows the story of a petty politician (Tritoni) member of a fictional party called "
La Grande Destra" ("
The Great Right"), apparently worried by Communism being on the rise, plotting to topple the Italian parliamentary republic and rise to power by installing in its place a far-right dictatorship, and his attempts to put together a ragtag bunch of allies from high places (all of which are hopeless and goofy caricatures and more worried about their mundane interests) in order to execute the plans.
All comedy aside, this starts with some of his henchmen pulling off a false-flag attack by blowing up the statue of the Virgin Mary atop of the Duomo of Milan, which is blamed by pretty much everyone on some nondescript far-left extremists.
Later he gets in contact with an old disgraced general who was himself part of another attempted coup back in 1968 (which never happened in real life, but may or may not be a nod to the
Piano Solo) and was discharged for that, in order to get a list of the military officers who took part in the plot back then and convince them to get on board in the plans. An industrial magnate is also persuaded to provide material for the whole operation, with the help of some intelligence blackmailing.
Eventually the group of plotters gets in contact with the second-in-charge of the secret services from the "
young but already well accomplished"
Greek military junta, which (seemingly) is willing to give them support and endorsement for their coup in Italy, and (seemingly) is willing to provide them asylum in Greece just in case the coup will ever fail.
Anyway, the coup plot is always one step close to failing.
Many of the important military contacts in the list inevitably turn out to be a bunch of oafs (if not ailing geriatrics by this point). Their private meeting in a beachside villa with the Greek Junta envoy gets casually caught by a literal paparazzi and the secret is passed along to a friend politician, at first to his skepticism, and gets almost publicly disclosed. From that, infos of the coup gets eventually revealed some hours in advance to a few members of the other political parties (Socialists, Communists, Christian Democrats, in a typical 70s Italy's style) and, in turn, told to the Ministry of the Interior.
In the end, regardless, the plotters and their militia still manage to launch their takeover of the transportation facilities and the national television headquarters, but the mission is marred with embarrassing failures.
Notably, first their transceivers mistakenly pick up the wavelength of the radio shack of some guy playing chess on-radio, and they mistake the chess moves as the paratrooping coordinates. Then, when they finally get to take over the TV headquarters, they come in so late that they get told that the daily broadcast has long since ended and there is nobody with a television turned on to possibly listen to the announcement speech they had worked so hard to prepare (an objective in the planned Borghese coup as well, it should be noted). Only the invasion from sea on the summer residence of the President of the Republic is half-successful, but is soon stopped by the police coming in from behind.
The plotters are all found and arrested, the plot is foiled, and everyone is brought before the President of the Republic.
There, the Ministry of the Interior reveals the whole story -- but, warning about the reaction that the Left is going have in response to these facts, asks the President for his resignation, the dissolution of the Parliament members, and the institution of a technocratic government for the time being to weather the crisis. The situation gets heated as the President refuses, Tritoni steals a grenade threatening to toss it, and the President dies killed by a heart attack ("
the obstacle has been overcome on its own", the Ministry of the Interior comments).
News roll in about the change of government (to which the leader of the "
La Grande Destra" party throws all his support, among others), with the reassurance that new elections will come in once the situation will be normalized.
One year later and, in a twist of events, the newscasts celebrate instead the first anniversary of the newborn police-state regime with a parade of the army on the capital in honor of the "
recently regained order and discipline".
Meanwhile, Tritoni, excluded from all this, is seen making business deals at a bar table with some emissaries from some African state to sell his infallible "overnight coup" plan (the most important thing being the takeover of the national TV station to broadcast the announcement, he says, but when he gets informed that the African country is so backwater it has no television or radio networks, he advises that they must make do with broadcasting the proclamation to the country via telephone to everyone...).
