The car’s star-making turn came early. In the opening minutes of the movie, a tangerine Lamborghini Miura zooms over an Italian viaduct.

A Sixties swinger type, with long silver sideburns and sunglasses, floors the accelerator and roars into a darkened tunnel, only to emerge shortly afterwards squashed inside a crumpled Lamborghini. The mafia, as is its wont, had murderously hidden a bulldozer inside the pass.

That scene depicts a human tragedy, but for car lovers, the real tragedy comes with the apparent destruction of one of the most beautiful cars of all time.

It took two cars to make that heartbreak: one perfect Miura P400S, one previously-wrecked Miura shell. The latter, aftering tumbling down half an Italian mountain and into a river, was never seen again—members of the film crew assume some conniving local saw the crash and retrieved the wreck from the riverbed after nightfall.

That leaves the driving car, assumed to be chassis number 3586, now for sale from Cheshire Motorcars UK. While some factories might be able to produce detailed logs for every car they’ve built, Lamborghini, now in the midst of a reorganization of its archive, cannot.

In The Italian Job, the movie car’s exterior and interior are visible: orange over white. Only one 1968 Miura bore such a combination and this is it !.

There’s also the matter of dates. The first scene of The Italian Job was filmed in the Great St. Bernard Pass on the last week of June, 1968. Records show that this car was delivered to a distributor on July second, leaving a perfect window in which to disconnect the odometer, drive the car up the pass, film the action shots and return the car to the lot.

For all the detective work done to track down this car, and the hoards who contest its movie legitimacy, there’s the solid fact that regardless of its movie pedigree, this car is a pristine example of a second-series 1968 P400 Lamborghini Miura with 12,000 original miles on the clock. Probable sale price at auction : $3.5m.  Is it the “Italian Job Miura”? Probably.

Would a potential owner mind much to find that this wasn’t the movie car? Would he frown as he roared through the Great St. Bernard Pass, winding up the 4 Litre, normally aspirated, transverse mounted mid-engined V12 to way passed 6,500rpm then punching the gear lever through the chromed gate into fifth as the needle hits 175mph?  Probably not.

(Video : Here We Go - 1969 The Real Italian Job Opening Sequence : Sweet ride ! Tangerine Lamborghini Miura roaring through the Great St. Bernard Pass, with Matt Munro's "On Days Like These .." blasting through the stereo - Now folks, it just doesn't get any cooler than this !)