He cuts back and forth between Col. Mathieu and other military and civilian leaders and a raggedy band of FLN fighters, of which the key figure may be Ali la Pointe (Braham Haggiag), a reform school boy and professional criminal who converts to the FLN after witnessing a beheading in prison. Back on the streets, Ali receives instructions (carried by a small boy) to shoot a policeman who meets daily with an Algerian informer. A woman standing outside a cafe will hand him a gun.

Ali finds the cafe, the policeman, the woman and the gun, but when he pulls the trigger, the gun is not loaded. He feels betrayed by the FLN, but the woman takes him to her contact, who explains the reasoning: They did not know if they could trust him. Ali might have been recruited by the French in prison. The reason they told him to shoot the cop instead of the informer is that, if he were a police stooge, the police wouldn't object to the murder of a civilian, but they wouldn't let an informer shoot a French policeman. By pulling the trigger, Ali has symbolically committed a murder, earning his entry into the FLN.

This reasoning is chilling, and carries a terrible weight of logic. The strength of "The Battle of Algiers," the reason it is being viewed in the Pentagon 35 years after its making, is that it is lucid and dispassionate in its examination of the tactics of both sides. It shows the French setting up roadblocks and checkpoints between the Casbah and the European quarter. Then it follows three women, one with a child, who walk right past the checkpoints with bombs in their purses. One woman plants her bomb in a cafe and then, in a disturbing scene, watches the customers eating, drinking, smoking and talking -- customers who will soon be dead. The parallel with bombings in Israel, the U.K. and Iraq is prophetic and chilling.

Col. Mathieu does his job well. His chart of FLN cells has squares that are gradually filled in until, with the final defeat of Ali and three others, trapped in their hiding place, he declares victory. The FLN has been eliminated. Two years later, the film notes, "for no particular reason that anyone could explain," the uprising began again as mobs poured out of the Casbah and overwhelmed the police. In 1962, the French granted Algeria its freedom.

What lessons a modern viewer can gain from the film depends on who is watching and what they want to see. Those who study the French tactics should note that they failed. Although the American use of torture at Abu Ghraib has been credited, at least, with producing the names and locations of many enemy fighters, the scale of urban warfare in Iraq is escalating. A few days before I wrote this review, some 35 children were killed by a bomb while being given candy by Americans. The moral paradox is that many Iraqis will blame the deaths on us, because if we were not there, the bombing would not have taken place. Certainly the bombers were the murderers. But "The Battle of Algiers" shows now, as it did when it was made, that for nationalist resistance movements, the end justifies the means. President Bush said something in the debate that this film abundantly illustrates: Fighting terrorism is hard work.

My 1969 interview with Gillo Pontecorvo in South America, on the day he learned he was nominated for an Oscar, is online at rogerebert.com. "The Battle of Algiers" is newly available in a restored print on a three-disc Criterion edition, including documentaries, and interviews with Pontecorvo, terrorism experts and film directors like Oliver Stone, Mira Nair, Steven Soderbergh and Spike Lee.