We Want the Colonels

The film is set in the Italy of 1973. A far-right member of parliament finds his own party's line too soft and starts making contact with the army; his aim is to prepare a coup. He moves between officers, businessmen and church circles trying to assemble an alliance. But word of the plan reaches the interior minister, who begins making calculations of his own. The story runs on those two preparations chasing each other. Mario Monicelli's film looks directly at the Italy of its moment. In those years real coup attempts and the strategy of tension were being argued about in the country; the colonels' junta was still in power in Greece, and the title points there. Comedy here is a way of hardening rather than softening: the plotters are shown as incompetent while the danger stays real. Ugo Tognazzi plays the deputy as ridiculous and frightening at once. What it arrives at attaches the fear of a coup not to one man but to an entire political climate.